Excitebike

It was the first game in the Excite series. Designed and directed by Shigeru Miyamoto, the smooth side-scrolling game engine his team developed for Excitebike was later used to develop Super Mario Bros. (1985), which had the effect of Mario smoothly accelerating from a walk to a run, rather than move at a constant speed. A critical and commercial success. It spawned several sequels and has been re-released multiple times onto other Nintendo platforms, such the Wii's and Wii U's Virtual Console, and the Nintendo Classics service.

• Title — Excitebike • Developer — Nintendo R&D4 • Publisher — * Nintendo • PC-88, X1 • Hudson Soft • Director — Shigeru Miyamoto • Producer — Shigeru Miyamoto • Designer — Shigeru Miyamoto • Programmer — Toshihiko Nakago • Composer — Akito Nakatsuka Soyo Oka (FDS) • Series — Excite • Platforms — Arcade, PC-88, X1, PC-8001mkIISR, MZ-2500, Famicom Disk System, Nintendo e-Reader, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo 3DS • Released — NES Arcade PC-8801October 1985 X1 Famicom Disk SystemDecember 9, 1988 e-ReaderSeptember 16, 2002 Game Boy Advance Nintendo 3DSJune 6, 2011 • Genre — Racing • Modes — Single-player, multiplayer • Arcade System — Nintendo VS. System, PlayChoice-10

• Illustration — The player jumps high above the computer racers. Excitebike is a side-scrolling racing game in which the player takes control of a motocross racer. The two gameplay modes are Selection A as a solo race run, and Selection B against computer-controlled opponents. The objective of the game is to finish in third place or higher in a preliminary race to qualify for the Excitebike championship race. The A button accelerates the bike, and the B button activates a turbo boost that enhances the bike's speed, but overheats the engine if it is used for too long, forcing an immobile cooldown period. The engine's temperature can be reset by driving over arrows located along the course. The player can use the directional pad to shift between lanes, and to shift the racer's balance midair after a jump. Landing squarely on both wheels allows the racer to maintain momentum, but an uneven landing will result in a loss of speed or a crash. As the game progresses, the player must contend with additional obstacles on the track such as gaps, rough patches that slow the bike if hit, and bottlenecks with only two lanes instead of four. Design Mode allows players to create tracks using 19 types of hurdles, with options to save and load created tracks for the Famicom Data Recorder tape drive, which was unreleased outside Japan.

There are two enhanced versions, both titled Vs. Excitebike. The first version was released on VS. UniSystem for arcades in 1984, after the Famicom release. It is similar to its Famicom Disk System counterpart, though this version lacks the Design option and has three difficulty levels. There is one major gameplay difference: if the player causes five opponents to crash their bikes (without the player themselves crashing) the overheat gauge turns white and the colors of the player's sprite change. The player is now able to use unlimited turbo until they crash; then the gauge and the sprite colors go back to normal. The second was released for the Famicom Disk System peripheral in 1988. The graphics and core gameplay are still the same, and the FDS version has several distinctive features that the NES and arcade versions lack: • "VS. Excite" mode puts two players competing against each other. The options include the maximum number of rounds to play, the track, and the number of laps. • The music is completely different; none of the songs from the original game are present, and it has a gameplay theme. The music is composed by Soyo Oka. • The "Original Excite" mode is based on the main mode of the arcade version, with minor differences such as a different color palette. • Its writable disk format can save created tracks.

also known as Mario Excite Bike or BS Excitebike, is a remake of Excitebike released for the Japan-only Satellaview peripheral for Super Famicom. The human racers have been replaced by Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach, Wario, Toad, and some of Bowser's Koopa Troopas. The concept was unchanged except for a "SUPER" mode where the player has unlimited turbo and coins spread across the courses to increase top speed in a manner similar to the Mario Kart series.

In Japan, Game Machine listed VS. Excitebike as the fifth most successful table arcade unit of January 1985. In North America, the game was number 13 on the RePlay arcade software charts in December 1985. It ended the year as America's second highest-grossing arcade system game of 1985, below Nintendo's own Hogan's Alley. The game has received generally positive reviews. Allgame gave Excitebike its highest possible rating of five stars and referred to the game as a "staple of any NES collection", praising its graphics as cute and its controls as simple yet still requiring strategy to apply properly. The review noted the design mode, as "the first of its kind in a console game, and greatly extends the life of the title by featuring 19 different components you can piece together to build your own course". IGN praised the NES version in 2007 as "ridiculously addictive" and that it "proves video games don't need to have flashy graphics or complex AI to actually be fun. Sure, there are other racing games out there today, hundreds of them. This one may not necessarily be better than the recent stuff, but it's unique, addictive, and demonstrates what gaming is really about". IGN ranked Excitebike as the 14th best NES game. GamesRadar ranked it as the 12th best game on the NES Classic Edition, saying that it has aged well with "a great sense of speed while driving and an excellent sense of balance while jumping and landing". Game Informer ranked the game 44 on its top 100 games of all time. Kotaku editor Jason Schreier ranked it as the worst game on the NES Classic Edition, calling it "a truly awful video game" but with no explanation.

The side-scrolling gameplay of Excitebike was key to the development of Super Mario Bros. (1985). The same Miyamoto-led team that developed Excitebike went on to develop a 1985 NES port of side-scrolling beat 'em up arcade game Kung-Fu Master (1984) called Kung Fu. Miyamoto's team used the technical knowledge they had gained from working on both side-scrollers to further advance the platforming "athletic game" genre they had created with Donkey Kong (1981) and were key steps towards Miyamoto's vision of an expansive side-scrolling platformer. While working on Excitebike and Kung Fu, he devised the concept of a platformer in which the player can "strategize while scrolling sideways" over long distances, and has colorful backgrounds rather than black. Super Mario Bros. utilized the fast scrolling game engine Miyamoto's team had originally developed for Excitebike, which allowed Mario to smoothly accelerate from a walk to a run, rather than move at a constant speed like in earlier platformers. Excitebike spawned several sequels, including Excitebike 64 (2000), Excite Truck (2006), Excitebots: Trick Racing (2009), and the WiiWare game Excitebike: World Rally (2009). An Excitebike-themed track was released as downloadable content for Mario Kart 8 (2014), and was available by default in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (2017). A group of Excitebike racers cameo as an Assist Trophy in Super Smash Bros. Brawl.