I opened an article by Zoe Skyforest for Hackaday titled GameCube Bot Records Your Play in a Weird Way. The article opened:
If you wanted to record yourself playing on a GameCube, you could use a VCR to capture the video output on tape.
“If you wanted” eh? “Could…” Talk about presumptuous. How about I wanted and I did. Settle in now: It is story-time.
Super Mario Kart was released for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System on August 27, 1992 in Japan, and on September 1, 1993 in North America. The combination of Mario and friends and kart racing proved to be successful, so successful that every Nintendo home console and every handheld console starting with the Game Boy Advance has received an entry in the Mario Kart series.
The fourth entry in the series was Mario Kart: Double Dash for the Nintendo GameCube. It was released in all regions in November 2003. I probably received my copy on Christmas 2003, or not long after (that would be five years to the day I received Pokémon Red). Double Dash was unique among the Mario Kart for a reason suggested by the title – you had two characters per kart instead of one. This allowed for some interesting mechanics, such as having each character have an item and switch between them to strategically use the items. But in the end, Double Dash is a Mario Kart game just like the others, with the controls, mechanics, item list, and course selection that one would have already come to expect from the first three entries in the series.
I was a fan of Double Dash and personally preferred it to the prior entries in the series. While I had spent a good amount of time with Mario Kart 64 not long before taking up Double Dash, I appreciated one improvement by subtraction that Double Dash made to playing single-player. For those of you wondering why I was concerned with single-player Mario Kart Double Dash, I refer you an article where I discussed the cold life lessons gleaned from playing the original Mario Party solo. Mario Kart 64 had a “rubber-band” effect where the CPU players would catch up to you at lightning speed if it fell too far behind (I recall it being mitigated on a few courses, namely Kalimari Desert off the top of my head). Perhaps some people were so talented at Mario Kart 64 that the rubber-band never caught up, but I found it a bit annoying that the end result of racing very well and racing so-so were often the same. Whatever rubber-band effect Double Dash had was at least not so extreme and “good” racing was better rewarded.
I would categorize myself as good at Mario Kart by the time I picked up Double Dash. I was almost certainly better than the average driver. With that being said, I was hardly elite in the grand scheme of Mario Kart drivers out there in the world. For example, in online play in Mario Kart 7 for Nintendo 3DS, I checked in at better than the average online driver, but often ran into people who were clearly in one of the many classes above me. When I was in college, I raced against a former classmate in Mario Kart Wii online play and was left in the dust on every course except the re-made Sherbert Land from Mario Kart 64, where I raced several tiers above my normal level thanks to being able to power-slide effectively around a big ice-section (oddly enough I do not recall having been good on that track in the original MK64, but it is my best track by a wide margin on Wii).
Double Dash had four “Cups” with four tracks each—Mushroom Cup, Flower Cup, Star Cup, and Special Cup—making for a total of 16. It had three normal difficulty levels: 50cc, 100cc, 150cc, ascending to both top speed and difficulty. Upon placing first in the 150cc Special Cup, the player unlocked the All Cup Tour. I quote from the Super Mario Wiki for the description of the All Cup Tour:
Unlike the other four cups, the All Cup Tour has the player racing on all sixteen tracks of the game … Each track that the player races on is chosen in a random order, though always starting with Luigi Circuit (the first course of the game) and always ending with Rainbow Road (the final course of the game).
Mario Kart Wiki “All Cup Tour” page
Winning the All Cup Tour on 150cc was no challenge. So long as I had two working hands, I would certainly prevail on points over the course of 16 races. In fact, I won enough that I had the same thought in the summer of 2005 that the NFL’s New England Patriots would have a couple of years later: Could I go 16/16? That led to another thought: Could I record myself going 16/16? I would spend part of my summer vacation finding out.
My Mom’s television had a built-in VCR (I do not think I had a stand-alone VCR at that stage). I did have blank tapes. I connected my GameCube to the TV with the VCR, inserted a tape, and recorded as I set off on my journey to complete a perfect All Cup Tour. You might ask: Who was I recording for?
Was I going to post a video on the very-recently launched and pre-Google YouTube? Perish the thought. The only computer I had at home in 2005 was a Windows 95, and we did not have home internet at that time (we would re-enter modernity in early 2006 with a new PC and internet). Had you asked me how to upload a video to the internet, I would have probably tilted my head. Even if I could have uploaded such a video, I would have had no interest in being an internet celebrity—I was already of the view way back then that “reality” TV was negatively affecting public behavior by inspiring random ordinary people to act as if there were a camera on them every moment of every day (little did I know what was coming around the bend).
Was I going to show my friends my Double Dash skills? Not at all. To the best of my recollection, I did not see anyone from school during that summer break. Moreover, while I had friends at school who played games, I doubt anyone would have cared all that deeply about my sweeping the Double Dash All Cup Tour. I do not recall having ever told anyone about my accomplishment or that I recorded my accomplishment, thus violating the one true rule of being a hero.
In the end, I suppose I sought to record a perfect 16/16 run through the All Cup Tour simply because I could.
Despite being elite at Double Dash against computer-controlled opponents, my quest for a perfect All Cup Tour was not easy. The main problem, of course, was that my goal was to win 16 consecutive races on 16 different tracks. Thus, any mistake or ill-timed moment of bad luck in any of those 16 races could end up ending my quest for perfection. In-race items were the bane of my quest for perfection. In a vacuum, I was faster than the computer racers. But items such as explosive shells, bolts of lighting, unfortunately-placed banana peels, and the like, had a way of leveling the field and impeding my progress. While I do not remember the exact kart I used (I think it was Toad Kart, but it may have been Turbo Yoshi), I have always preferred light karts with high acceleration to mitigate the damage inflicted by the various items.
The tracks varied in difficulty—and not necessarily in terms of the game’s placement. For example, Wario Colosseum, which is the first of the four Special Cup tracks (and the only two-lap course in the game), was the closest thing to an “automatic” win for me. It was a long track and its corners agreed with my driving style. On that track, I could consistently put enough distance between myself and most of the computer-controlled opponents to not have to worry about being pummeled by items, so I would almost always win that track comfortably. Conversely, Baby Park in the lowest of the four Cups, the Mushroom Cup, was a nightmare. While all of the other tracks had three laps, or two in the case of Wario Colosseum, Baby Park had seven. This did not make Baby Park a long race. It had seven laps because the track was an extremely short oval . My problem with Baby Park was that its extremely short length and lack of bends meant that I was always vulnerable to being hit by one item or another, often with too little warning to block or take other evasive measures. While I am sure that some people are good enough at Double Dash to negate the randomness, I was not quite that good, so Baby Park ended more than one perfect run.
I recall initially posting a few of runs in the 12-4 through 14-2 ranges, but not having come close to perfect. But having won that much, I knew that I could in theory put together a perfect run, so I started to abandon some runs when I lost early on, recording over my failed efforts (I am sure that was great for the cassette). Unfortunately, in light of the fact that this happened more than two decades ago and I did not go on to try to become a Double Dash professional, my memories of some of the particulars are a bit hazy. But I do remember one specific failure other than my still being haunted by Baby Park.
On one of my later runs, I recall having survived Baby Park in the 6th or 7th race while being undefeated. That gave me hope since Baby Park was the most common perfect run-blocker. In the eighth or ninth race, I came up to Mushroom Bridge from the Flower Cup. Mushroom Bridge was one of my favorite tracks (nice aesthetic) and I was good on it – it was set up in a way that I could generally race with enough separation to stay out of trouble. However, on this occasion, I had a rough race – probably some combination of bad form and bad luck, and I ended up losing in a proverbial photo-finish after being overtaken by a heavier computer-controlled opponent with high top-end speed at the line. Having made it that far, I decided to finish out the run, and I ended with my then-best-ever mark of 15-1.
I vaguely recall having been almost content enough with 15-1 to call it a win. But I was back at it not long after. After a couple of failed attempts that were quickly abandoned, I had one run where I made it some distance undefeated before reaching Baby Park, which was still something of a 50/50 proposition for me. I managed to make it through the baby bugaboo, and then I raced mistake-free-enough the rest of the way to finish a perfect 16-0. Better yet, it was all recorded on VHS, and I recall having watched the video at least once with coffee or something to enjoy having completed my summer project.
What was left for me? Winning the All Cup Tour the first time unlocked Mirror Mode, but despite Mirror Mode being the ultimate challenge (150cc with mirrored tracks), I did not have much interest or inclination in figuring out the best way to race all of those tracks mirrored. I am fairly confident that I never completed the All Cup Tour in mirror mode, not least because my reading about the “Parade Kart” being the prize for beating All Cup Tour on Mirror Mode difficulty while researching this article in 2026 came as news to me. In fact, I may not have played much Double Dash at all after completing my perfect All Cup Tour. Going 16-0 in All Cup Tour came with no specific in-game recognition, so I suppose that I conjured my own final boss and defeated it, while ignoring the game’s more official final boss of All Cup Tour on Mirror Mode.
I almost certainly do not have the VHS anymore, so readers who want to watch a recording of my completing a game will have to content themselves with Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search. But if that tape still exists and somehow turns up, I would certainly write a more detailed report on one of my great gaming accomplishments. But in any event, writing this article makes me think that I should take on Mario Kart 8 Deluxe for Switch, which I have but have not yet played much.
