Excitebike 64 - Desert Mode (Actual N64 Capture)

This is a capture of me playing the Desert mode in Excitebike 64 for the Nintendo 64. This is not an emulator and was not played on the Wii U Virtual Console. This footage was recorded directly from my Nintendo 64 using a real Excitebike 64 cartridge. I'm using my favorite character: Nigel "The Duke" York.

I played the original Excitebike on the NES at my uncle's house when I was kid back around the early '90s. I thought the game was really cool, but more than anything I liked to fool around with the track editor.

Around 2000 I noticed Nintendo Power previewing the upcoming Excitebike 64, but I didn't pay too much attention to it. Shortly after it was released I even managed to play the game at a friend's house and I still didn't give it much thought.

Around early 2001 I played ATV Off Road Fury on a neighbor's PlayStation 2, and I thought the game was fun (I've always liked off-road racing). I immediately decided that I needed a game like that to give me my off-road racing fix, and I remembered Excitebike 64. I called my local Wal-Mart and found that they had the game in stock, so I raced down there and instantly picked up my own copy.

When I got home and started playing Excitebike 64, I found that it was even better than I remembered. In fact, it was so good that it soon took the top spot as my favorite Nintendo 64 racer of all time - even beating out Wave Race 64. The courses were excellent and there was a nice variety of indoor and outdoor tracks, not to mention really fun special modes. There was just so much content that the game never got old. Left Field hit the ball out of the park with this title.

The Desert mode is one of the "Special Tracks" in the game. It's a randomly generated desert where you have to run over 10 camp fires as fast as possible while competing against AI racers. When I first played this mode it instantly reminded me of Motocross Madness on the PC, which I used to play in my high school typing class.

It turns out that this similarity wasn't a coincidence. One of the programmers at Left Field said he was inspired to make the Desert mode after seeing Motocross Madness (see here: https://nintendoeverything.com/excite-bike-64-devs-on-the-games-development-origins-miyamoto-feedback-more/). That programmer did a great job with this mode and definitely proved that the Nintendo 64 could achieve something similar to a PC game.

Recorded with the Hauppauge HD PVR and the official N64 S-video cable. I used a Toshiba model D-R550 DVD Recorder to upconvert the N64's native 240p signal to 480i so that the Hauppauge could capture the console's audio/video signal.

I'm using a standard N64 controller.