Record-Setting Win Gone Unnoticed

I usually don’t like doing this, as it seems a bit selfish of me, but I felt compelled to reveal my dirty little secret to the world. I, Matt, am the owner of the World Record for Mario Kart 64’s Choco Mountain Time Trial, with an amazing time of 1:46:400. This picture is my sole proof of the record in question. I apologize for the blurriness, but I only have a cell-phone camera.

If you search Twin Galaxies’ site, which is THE source for video game records, you’ll see the top record of 1:46:840, which is the Japanese National Record. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news Japan, but it appears that your record has now been broken. In fact, it has been broken for about seven years.

Sad thing is, Twin Galaxy will not approve of the record because I never taped the record-setting run, and it wasn’t done under any referee supervision. I’ve contacted Twin Galaxies numerous times in the past about my record, but they’ve never gotten back to me.

I originally did the run a few months after I got the game, back in 1997, but I never knew of Twin Galaxies then. I didn’t even have a computer at the time. The only source that I had to know it was a record-setting run was the Mario Kart 64 Official Guide from Nintendo. They had a list of times for each course, and they said if I beat any of them, I was one of the best in the world. I don’t remember the testers’ times, but I do remember beating the Choco Mountain one by a good margin.

Something tells me that this kind of situation is not completely abnormal. I bet there quite a few people that hold records for games they don’t even know about, and it’s a little disheartening for Twin Galaxies to have those kinds of rules in place. I know why, what with all the easy hacking/photoshopping going on, but it ruins it for the rest of us, law-abiding citizens.