Excitebike is a race against your own engine. The rider tears along a side-on motocross track with four lanes, over ramps, humps and mud, and two buttons both make him go: A accelerates, and B accelerates harder while a temperature gauge climbs. Push B for too long and the engine overheats, and the rider has to pull over and wait while it cools, watching the time tick away. Shigeru Miyamoto made it in 1984 with the programmer Toshihiko Nakago, and the cartridge came with something unusual for a console game of the time: a Design mode for building your own tracks.
Fast facts
- Developer: Nintendo; Shigeru Miyamoto with Toshihiko Nakago of SRD.
- Released: Famicom, November 1984; NES in North America, 1985; in Britain the NES version was on sale by September 1987.
- Modes: Selection A (alone against the clock), Selection B (against computer riders) and Design.
- Arcade: Vs. Excitebike, for Nintendo’s Vs. System cabinets.
Racing the temperature gauge
Retro Gamer’s history of the series sets out the controls. With every track four lanes wide, up and down on the D-pad move the bike between them, and the A and B buttons work “as independent accelerators, with the B button offering faster acceleration but at the cost of seeing your bike’s engine overheat” and losing time while it cools down. Arrows painted on the track cool the engine as the bike rides over them, so a skilled player can link long stretches of extra speed together. Club Nintendo’s British edition described the tension in 1989: “your engine is already near overheating point. With little other choice, you press down your turbo acceleration and hope and pray for a cool zone to appear after the next obstacle.”
The jumps need care as well. The player can change the bike’s speed and the length and height of each jump, and can wheelie over smaller obstacles, and landing squarely on both wheels keeps the bike moving. There are five tracks. To go on to the next, Club Nintendo explained, “you have to complete the track within the third best time”. In Selection B the other riders bump and jostle, The Games Machine found, “quite mercilessly”.
Design mode
The third mode is a track editor. The player moves along an empty road, picks an obstacle by its letter from A to S, a ramp, a hump or a patch of mud, and places it, then sets the number of laps and races the result alone or against the computer. Computer and Video Games reported that a finished design was kept “in RAM for use when you get back to play mode”.
Keeping it longer depended on where you lived. In Japan, Retro Gamer explains, Excitebike could save tracks to cassette on the Famicom Data Recorder, the tape deck sold for Family BASIC, so players could load and race them again. That recorder was never sold elsewhere, so NES owners lost their tracks when they switched off, even though the game still offered them the option to save. Wrecking Crew worked the same way the following year.
Retro Gamer called the editor the earliest example of one in a home video game. That overstates it: home computer owners had been building their own screens in Lode Runner’s editor since 1983.
Vs. Excitebike and Super Mario Bros.
Nintendo also made an arcade version, Vs. Excitebike, for its Vs. System cabinets. In 2010 Miyamoto told Satoru Iwata that it shaped Super Mario Bros.. “The arcade version of Excitebike had three levels, and you could choose where you wanted to start playing. That was because we thought people who were good would want to start at the advanced levels right away.” Since cartridges could not save, the same thinking produced the warp zones that let good players jump ahead in Super Mario Bros. Iwata added that the team also brought in “the partial scrolling technology from Excitebike, which allowed you to scroll part of the screen”.
Reception
By the time the NES reached Britain in 1987, Excitebike looked old. Computer and Video Games thought it had “enough track features to provide an entertaining, if dated game”, and liked being able to build tracks out of “hundreds of combinations”. The Games Machine called it “fast” and “addictive”.
Later games
Nintendo re-released the game on the Famicom Disk System in Japan in 1988 as Vs. Excitebike, with a two-player mode. The series came back in three dimensions with Excitebike 64 (2000), made in California by Left Field Productions, the studio co-founded by Mike Lamb. Edge praised its “superb control system”, and the cartridge included the original Excitebike as a bonus game, along with Excite 3D, a 3D version of it. Excite Truck, made by Monster Games for the Wii and on sale in Britain from March 2007, carried the name on to trucks and off-road terrain that changed shape as the player drove over it.
Sources
- Nintendo, Iwata Asks: Super Mario Bros. 25th Anniversary, volume 5, “Original Super Mario Developers” (2010, web): Miyamoto and Nakago making Excitebike; the Famicom release in November 1984; the partial scrolling; the arcade version’s three starting levels and the warps. https://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/wii/mario25th/4/1/
- Stuart Hunt, “The History of Excitebike”, Retro Gamer Collection volume 5 (2011), pp. 110–113: the controls, the overheating and the cooling arrows, the two racing modes, the track editor, the Famicom Data Recorder, the save option outside Japan, Vs. Excitebike.
- Computer and Video Games issue 71, September 1987, p. 79: NES review (Mattel, the Design mode and its letters, saving “in RAM”, “entertaining, if dated”).
- The Games Machine issue 2, December 1987, p. 69: NES review (the three modes, the five tracks, the computer riders).
- Club Nintendo (UK) issue 1, 1989, p. 17: Excitebike (the five tracks, qualifying, the cool zones, jumps and wheelies, the number of laps).
- Edge issue 86, July 2000, pp. 88–89: Excitebike 64 review (Left Field; the control system; the original and Excite 3D as bonus games). Issue 171, January 2007, p. 65: Excite Truck review (Monster Games; terrain deformation).
- Wikipedia, “Excitebike” (web, secondary): release dates; the landings; the 19 obstacle types in Design mode; the Disk System Vs. Excitebike of 1988. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excitebike