Remove The Sky, And Mario Kart 8 Gets Pretty Weird

Ah, Moo Moo Meadows. So calming. So picturesque. Wait a minute…something’s not right here. Luigi, now what’ve you done?!?!

Ok, Luigi’s not the one to blame here. This is the latest piece of Mario Kart 8 trickery done by brothers Chadderz and Bean, the first—and only—two people to hack the game that we know of. This isn’t just a hack, though. As Bean explains in the video, the mesmerizing smearing effect came about because of a mistake they made when trying to perform a proper hack:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czPYyZ3RnQs

“During the course of a live stream where I was beginning a texture hack of Moo Moo Meadows, I accidentally made a mistake when altering the track skybox,” Bean writes in the description under the video. “This mistake caused the game to not bother loading a skybox at all, which instead of making it crash like any sensible game would have done [citation needed], instead simply resulted in a very familiar effect… another void, or hall of mirrors.”

The “void” he’s referencing is one of the brothers’ earlier videos, where they thought they’d discovered an unused track for the game but ended up finding a whole lot of empty space. Whatever Nintendo had in mind for this unused Mario Kart 8 real estate, it made for some insane visual effects:

“Not perhaps a surprising result, though I confess that it was unexpected for me,” Bean continued in his latest video. “In all other Mario Karts, failing to render a model will simply display blackness, so it’s quite trippy to see this instead.”

Bean ends with some advice for other prospective Mario Kart modders, saying: “Mess up a track, you’ll end up with this kind of effect. If ever custom tracks and the like become the norm, I imagine creators will be in situations like this fairly frequently.”

I’m not sure that will happen, though—at least anytime soon. Bean and Chadderz remain the only two people to publicize their Mario Kart 8 hacks, if not the only two people to pull them off in the first place. Plus, as they told me back in August, the exploit they discovered has already been patched over by Nintendo.

That’s a shame, because the two of them continue to produce some of the weirdest, most wonderful pieces of footage I’ve seen since Mario Kart 8 came out back in May. As with all of their previous work hacking and modding the game, I love the way that this alternate-dimension version of Moo Moo Meadows exaggerates the surreal qualities of Nintendo’s work for a surprising effect. I mean, just imagine how insane it would be to play one of the game’s Rainbow Road tracks with this melting effect blurring your perspective.

Some day, Luigi. Some day.

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