Muppets RaceMania
PS1 - Traveller's Tales, 2000
For the last 20 years Traveller’s Tales have developed LEGO games, but before that they created mostly licensed games for Disney, Pixar and LucasFilm. These IPs would all later be under the same roof, as Disney would buy Pixar in 2006 and LucasFilm in 2012. Back in 2004, to slightly less fanfare, it bought the other TT game IP, The Muppets.
After Mario Kart (Nintendo, 1992) was released, kart racers were everywhere. But in the 3D era, Nintendo were still king of the karts with Mario Kart 64 (Nintendo, 1997) and the more adventurous Diddy Kong Racing (Rare, 1997). I have never played Crash Team Racing (Naughty Dog, 1999) nor have any experience of Crash Bandicoot, but PS1 fans loudly insist it is as good or better than MarioKart 64. Whichever side we fought on during the console wars (never forget), we all suffered a lot of licensed shovelware kart racers, with the likes of Looney Tunes, Disney, LEGO and South Park getting their own. Enter Muppets RaceMania, Traveller's Tales’ first effort at a racing game.
It would be unfair to describe RaceMania as shovelware, as it is much more than just a cash-in. Due to the variety of modes and multiple layers of unlocks, you find different numbers depending on what review you read, but the Muppets has 25 characters and 25 vehicles as well as around 34 tracks. Muppet Central puts that at 625 character/vehicle combinations, all of which have different stats. There really is a lot to do.
The Racing
Where the racing is concerned, there is none of the love and care that Nintendo designs into their games, or that The Jim Henson company showed the Muppets. Controls are floaty, but if you play for long enough you can get used to them. The tracks are interesting enough that require jumps and slides at certain places, but most of them are tight twisty indoor tracks which are difficult to drive with slippery handling and a lethargic camera. Worse, there are hundreds of places to get completely stuck in scenery all over the tracks needing to turn around or reverse. That's not the only annoyance built in to the game.
Each character has a special move which you can charge up by collecting 10 Muppety fruits from the track. Most of these special moves, as well as other weapons, will spin you facing the wrong direction or stop you dead for five seconds, or both. This will happen multiple times a race.
Some weapons will turn you into a cheese or something so you have something to look at while you have nothing else to do, but why not have some chaotic effects that cause some fun and havoc? Reverse controls, triple your speed, turn into a bouncy beach ball, anything would be better and more Muppety than sitting doing nothing.
These micro-punishments are simply not fun. There’s a reason Mario Kart 64 almost always allows you to continue racing, slowing you down or giving some effect instead of stopping you dead or taking away control. Nintendo respects the player enough not to take away their agency and stop them having fun.
You increase your boost meter by collecting fruit as you lap the course and deploy it as you need. Any strategy here is mostly lost as once you collect 10 fruit you can either deploy your special move (stop everyone else) or use it for a mega boost. The mega boost turns you into a blue light like in the screenshot below as you auto-zoom around the track like the Bullet Bill power up from Mario Kart. Unfortunately this is so powerful that it's a no brainer to save up for these and not use any boost until then. Likewise it's more powerful than your special move, so the only reason to use the move is that it unlocks the karts of the other players in that race.
The special moves fares better in battle mode as it adds to the Muppety chaos, but when the goal is to win the race it simply frustrates.
Battle Mode
The battle mode is still hampered compared to Mario Kart. Firstly, the camera is sluggish in a mode which needs lots of quick manouvres and U-turns. Secondly, as the tracks are mostly indoors and cramped, so combined with the camera issues, you rarely see anyone coming far enough away to plan your attack. The weapons are nowhere near as predictible and reliable as red and green shells even if you could. In Mario Kart you quickly learn exactly when someone is too far away or at too much of an angle to hit with your red homing shell. Not so here.
When you do hit your opponents, while it tells you how much damage you did, it doesn't indicate how much health they have left. Each player has health gauge instead of Mario Kart's very clear three-hits-and-you're-out signified by three balloons. You can do damage by ramming, which is fun and feels much like Destruction Derby (Reflections Interactive, 1995). However again, it's not consistent in when you or your opponent or both will take ramming damage. All these issues together make it feel too random.
Adventure Mode
RaceMania also has Adventure mode, which I find really fun. You have free reign to expore the tracks and complete different challenges. Collect sets of items within the time limits, find a 'boss' and then race them to unlock them in the game. There is a Doozer somewhere on the track which you need to physically push around to a 'warp point'. I can see this being annoying but I actually found this really fun, like the type of useless challenge you set yourself in many games just to see if you can. Adventure mode encourages you to learn the tracks and the many shortcuts, and it's more fun to play than the kart racing. Which is a shame as most people would understandably focus on the race modes. I'm definitely keeping this game in the rainy day list to progress some unlocks when I'm bored.
Stunt Mode
Stunt mode should be called 'trials mode'. Many reviews seem upset that you don't actually perform 'stunts' and perhaps if this was more accurately named it would have been better received. You are locked to a side-on view, and you need to carefully make your way accross a level of ramps, platforms and obstacles in a simliar way to Action Supercross or its successor Elastomania (Balazs Rozsa, 1997, 2000) or the Trials series (Ubisoft, 2000 onwards). It's well designed and quite tricky, requiring a high degree of control on steering, throttle, brakes and boost. It's probably my favourite mode, which is a shame as it's the fourth course of each track, locked behind wins at the first three. There are many popular downhill and obstacle trials games now, many of which sell very well, and I think this mode would be quite popular nowadays.
There are some other novel bits and bobs. In tournament mode you don’t only earn points for finishing positions. Instead of a timed button press to get a boost at the start, you must press whichever successive buttons light up on the screen, and you will earn a point for being the player who hits the highest number of them. You also get points for fastest lap, most hits of other drivers, among other things, all of which adds a welcome bit of strategy.
But despite great efforts from TT, it doesn’t make the podium of top kart racers. The Muppets lend themselves to anything crazy but there’s nothing that particularly makes them suit a straight up kart racer, which is the main mode the game is geared and marketed around. Maybe something more meta like the movies would have suited them more. They’re putting on a big race event for the crowds or you need to win races to raise money to save the muppets! While a lot of effort went into the content, the race gameplay is any old clone kart racer.
Reviews
Sadly, Statler and Waldorf aren’t the biggest critics of the game. IGN helpfully called it “Muppet racing at its finest”, though there are no other Muppet racing games. Gamespot’s review (with editors notes still in it after 25 years) states “Remove the Muppets… and you're left with no better than an average kart-racing game”. Maybe TT were just not experienced in racing games. A year later TT used the same engine to create Toy Story Racer which despite having fewer tracks, modes and no extra vehicles, was reviewed slightly better than RaceMania.
It may not be the best for kart racing fans, but for Muppets fans it was better received. The racers include many lesser-spotted Muppets, including many fan favourites from 1996’s Muppets Tonight. The Muppets look cute enough for the PS1 era, and are suitably used. Miss Piggy drives a monster truck, of course, and each set of tracks is themed around a Muppets film, with a clip from the movie played before each new track. The tracks really suit many of the movie themes and are lovely to play through. Even better, there is a Fraggle Rock track and playable Doozer, though sadly no Fraggle drivers.
Meet the Muppets
The highlight however, is the voice work. Each driver plus some other characters have voice lines throughout the races and menus, all recorded for the game, and are great. Steve Whitmire (who I am a fan of) had been the frog for 10 years by this point, and it was one of the last times Frank Oz and Jerry Nelson performed their characters before handing them on to a new generation. As noted by this very informative blog post, it was also the first appearances of a number of favourite characters since the deaths of Jim Henson (Rowlf, Link Hogthrob) and Richard Hunt (Scooter and Janice)
Matt Vogel (nice man and current voice of Kermit, who many people are not quite used to yet) mentions in an interview that he was just a stand-in for the latter two:
“There were only a few lines and I think I was cast to do it because they hadn’t made any official recasting choices for those characters at the time. I had a good time doing it, but I never thought it was a recast, just a one-time job.”
The music is not bad either. Academy Award winner Michael Giacchino is credited in the manual, although it's not clear how much he worked on this game in particular. He has done a lot of Henson material, including Muppet Monster Adventure (Magenta Software, 2000). He scored many movies and shows for Disney, Star Wars, Star Trek and Jurassic Park films. So it’s fair to say I knew his work, but had no idea he was involved with the Muppets.
It sounds like the Muppets did make an impression on TT, but it doesn't sound like TT were Muppets megafans. Head of Design Arthur Parsons describes the project:
“There was about seven of us working on it and it was just such a fun experience. We went out to meet The [Jim] Henson Company one time and were picked up from the airport in a stretch Hummer and Kermit was in there too. It was just amazing as he was talking to us, obviously there was the guy puppeteering him there too, but things like that you can never forget and take that away from us”.
I say this not to gatekeep (the Muppets tought us better than that) but to make the point that this is perhaps the root cause of the divided reception of the game. Take a look at Ryan Reynolds' Deadpool or Terry Matalas' Star Trek for the care taken when a fan takes over a series that they love. Or Tony Gilroy and his team on Star Wars' Andor for someone who understands and respects an iconic and beloved franchise.
The general consensus is that RaceMania is a poor game for racing fans, and an amazing game for Muppets fans. Do Muppet fans love it because they are blinded by the details and voices, while gamers can see through the fandom to a mediocre game? I do believe there are very good game modes in there, but ultimately I can't be trusted to say, because I’m a Muppet fan.
