Mickey’s Speedway USA

Developer: Rare, Ltd. Publisher: Nintendo

Released: November 13, 2000 Rated: E 6/10

I’m not even going to mince words on this one: Mickey’s Speedway USA is easily the weakest title of Rare, Ltd.’s legendary run on the Nintendo 64. On one hand, this feels like a total given, considering that, aside from perhaps Blast Corps, it’s the game from that category that seems to have the least amount of discussion or is the most often forgotten. But if you think about it, it never had to be that way, considering the way in which Rare had delivered genre and era-defining masterpieces for the console, both in the kart-racer genre with Diddy Kong Racing, and when given charge of a high-profile license with Goldeneye 007. In fact, even Rare’s output in terms of essentially contract work had been at a high level for a good while, going back to the SNES’ Ken Griffey Jr.’s Winning Run and even the GameBoy Color-exclusive predecessor to Speedway, Mickey’s Racing Adventure.

It’s with all this context, and, again, that good-as-gold R logo on the box, that really sets up the disappointment of popping in Mickey’s Speedway USA, even for just a quick change of pace from Mario Kart, when you realize just how uninspired this title really is. Starting with the first word in the name of the game, it’s a kart racer featuring Mickey Mouse and friends. If you’re familiar with the group’s other outing on the N64, Magical Tetris Challenge by Capcom, then you might know where this is going. A perfectly competent kart-racer, there’s no question, but Diddy Kong Racing this is not. It’s easy to jump into and handle, nobody on the roster is too unbalanced, even if Pete and Goofy’s acceleration is like a tricycle puttering through thick mud. Item pickups are pretty straightforward and analogous to those you’ll find in Mario Kart so that even in a group setting, newcomers and younger players will catch on pretty quick. But that’s really all there is to say from a gameplay standpoint – there’s no real learning curve or depth to the controls or mechanics. You’ll never complain about them but if you want to be tested, particularly against AI, it’s not going to hold your attention for long.

The other key aspect of the game, like with any kart racer, is the track design, which as you might assume, is based entirely on various US locations. Aside from the fact that several Midway racers already featured on the N64 utilize this concept on some scale, this also just comes off as sort of lazy. I’m kind of hard-pressed to think of any of the game’s 20 tracks that are particularly memorable, or even particularly challenging or visually striking. Sure, Alaska is covered in snow and Washington, D.C. has you drive through the White House, but it’s rare to finish a race or a Grand Prix and feel like you want to play a track again, especially when they’re all exceptionally short. The longest tracks in the game are barely a minute per lap, and many hover closer to 25-30 seconds, really highlighting the general lack of content on offer here.

Jim Cummings features in another N64 title as he reprises his usual role as Pete.

Overall, this really just feels like kind of an odd gimmick anyway, considering that Rare is a British studio. It’s just not hard to imagine that Rare either picked this concept as an easy one to execute, or was given it to execute in a way that would make the game both quick and marketable. Personally, I would have preferred something a little more Disney-centric, such as the Disney park-based tracks in Walt Disney World Quest: Magical Racing Tour, made around the same time by Crystal Dynamics and published by Eidos. The Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster just sounds like a much cooler, more Disney-centric track than driving through San Francisco again, where the design philosophy is “it’s got hills!” The main delivery of Disney vibes comes from the plot, where the cast is racing across the country to rescue Pluto from The Weasels, and are constantly jabbering at each other throughout their races. While it can be annoying to hear every character you hit with an item complain that you would have the audacity, the really lame part of this is actually Professor Ludwig von Drake telling you the name of the item you’ve picked up every single time you’ve obtained an item. Incessant doesn’t really capture it, and while we don’t have the hall-of-fame caliber composers from Rare like Grant Kirkhope or Graeme Norgate, anything worthwhile you’d find on the soundtrack is usually drowned out by soundbites. This is doubly true when playing the game’s version of battle mode, where pickups are the name of the game, and nothing else particularly interesting happens – it was likely included as a checklist item for everything Mario Kart had on offer.

The battle mode (called “contest”) is nothing to write home about, but personally I never found old Mario Kart battle modes to be that exciting either.

Mickey’s Speedway USA is definitely a game you’d want to like, and with Rare on hand to make it, you’d assume that you will. It might even go so far as to garner goodwill as much as it raises expectations, but the finished product feels uncharacteristically thrown together for the company. With their untouchable hot streak, even Disney-licensed and still Nintendo-published contract work still couldn’t fail outright, but with Diddy Kong Racing already under their belt, it just doesn’t feel like Rare had a lot to prove this time out, especially with more all-time classics being worked on around the same time, including Banjo-Tooie and Conker’s Bad Fur Day, which would send the N64 out with a bang. Mickey’s Speedway USA, on the other hand – well, it made it out for the 2000 holiday season, and that always helps.

Continuing Legacy

As much as I don’t want to compare something made by Rare to games on such a low level of integrity, Mickey’s Speedway USA calls to mind many licensed kart racers over the years, but the ones that come to mind are the Nickelodeon and Dreamworks kart racing series from GameMill Entertainment, as well as Disney Speedstorm. While the GameMill offerings are cookie-cutter retail releases and Speedstorm a free-to-play offering with a sterile futuristic sheen, the key factor in all of them is the palpable transparency of their cash-grabbing nature. Like Mickey’s Speedway USA, none of these are outright bad games, but they take recognizable characters and put them in the highly-marketable kart racer genre, with the former being sold at a budget-friendly price, and the latter employing a battle pass and loot box system for cosmetic items. A striking difference in how games are marketed for this purpose two decades later, but hard to deny the parallels of the product itself.