50 Years of Video Games: Excitebike (NES)

The North American video game market was in a rough spot between 1983 and 1985. A boom in the amount of game consoles and video games being produced for them lead to diminishing returns as quality became rare amidst the quantity, and soon the price was paid as a multi-billion dollar industry was reduced to a total revenue of around 100 million dollars between all remaining companies. The infamous tale of the video game crash is a familiar one to gamers, even those in other countries where its sting wasn’t felt as strongly. Almost as well known was what helped the video game market emerge from this massive slump, the Japanese company Nintendo releasing the Nintendo Entertainment System with an incredibly popular game that recaptured America’s hearts. That game… was not Excitebike, and while covering Super Mario Bros. here would be incredibly appropriate for 1985’s featured game, it is currently being saved for a special occasion later in the year. Since I’ve already covered Duck Hunt as well, the other options from the NES’s launch library include things like rudimentary sports games, forgettable flawed titles, or shallow peripheral accompaniments. Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt did have one other game by their side that seems to still get some respect today though: the side-scrolling motorcycle game Excitebike.

While Excitebike is technically a motorcycle racing game, the goal isn’t to outpace other racers with your little biker but instead you’re going up against the record times on the game’s five available tracks. When you start a session of Excitebike you’re asked to pick from one of the five tracks for your Challenge Race, this featuring a more lenient set of records to go up against to ease yourself into the gameplay. If you are able to at least beat the third best time for the Challenge Race, you get to retry the course in its Excitebike variant where the times are tighter, and so long as you can continue to place third or higher in the rankings, you then move onto the next race track while still in Excitebike’s higher difficulty bracket. While the third best time is always displayed in the bottom left, the best time is plastered periodically on the stadium walls, that time always eight seconds faster but still contextualizing the range you should aim for if you’re looking to continue on with your Excitebike experience.

Five tracks definitely sounds like a small amount and I won’t be convincing you it isn’t, but the tracks themselves do have a good arrangement of different impediments you’ll need to account for as you race to get the best total time after completing all the laps for that course. Large bumps in various shapes and sizes lead to one of the most important aspects of Excitebike: evening out your landing. As you are launched up these hills you’ll need to make sure that you reposition your bike as it comes back down. Tipping it forward and back to level out is the only true concern while airborne, but in order to maintain speed you’ll need to land just right, especially if you’re coming down on a sloped surface. If you mess up too badly you’ll even be launched from your bike, your little racer having to scramble back to it to climb back on and get back into the race.

The different shaped bumps lead to frequent tests of your ability to pitch your bike forward and back properly and are frequent enough that you’re always involved in maintaining your speed rather than simply sitting back and driving fast. This is partly because there are no actual turns in Excitebike, the course one long stretch but with four lanes you can weave in and out of. Staying in the right lane is also key to your success so movement while on flat turf is important as well. Dirt patches and stretches of grass will slow down your racer, small ramps can potentially launch you up and over other obstacles if you hit them right, and low walls can lead to you being launched off your bike if you aren’t able to weave between them or slow down to ride over them. A few odd pieces like the one with a long airborne bridge also exist and lets you pick between continuing on flat ground above or dropping off early if you’re worried about what’s ahead, and while the five tracks do grow in difficulty, they tend to string together enough well placed obstacles that a single race will require a lot of reactive play to ensure you can hit those tight time requirements.

Having a bunch of obstacles you need to react to and adjust your flight angle for probably wouldn’t make this game substantial enough to stick with players, but there is one simple addition that adds a good amount of depth to how you approach Excitebike’s courses. If you hold A in Excitebike you’ll move forward at a decent speed, but holding down B instead will speed you up greatly at the cost of starting to build up heat in your engine. If you overheat your bike you’ll come to a stop and need time to recover, so picking the moments to boost becomes key to hitting those records. You can launch yourself up a ramp or bump while bossting but it might mean you’ll land in somewhere rough. You can try to boost through rough patches but weaving through them would have been better if you could have managed speed and maneuvering better. You don’t want to heat your bike up too much before a straightaway or other opportunity for a speed increase pops up either, but there are also arrows on the track that will cool your engine if you run over them so you can account for these as well in trying to determine when it is time to drive normally or activate your turbo.

Excitebike features two main racing modes referred to as Selection A and Selection B. Selection A is purely you against the race track, but Selection B has other bikers active on the course at the same time. These racers are not competing with you at all, some able to move impossibly fast and others engaging in acts of self-sabotage with no clear agenda. The point of these game controlled bikers is to serve as an extra obstacle during the race, their presence sometimes denying lanes and bikers able to knock you off your ride if they hit your back wheel. You can do the same to them, but mostly this just makes getting the record times harder with a bit of randomness thrown in so that simpler mastering the five designs can still be made slightly fresh by unpredictable shakeups. There is no multiplayer component in Excitebike sadly which could have added greater longevity and even with two Selection modes the five tracks do feel limited, especially when the lower numbered ones are easy enough to master. There is one extra left in this game though that tries to add in greater variation though, although the efficacy of it is certainly debatable.

Excitebike comes with a Design mode where you are free to create your own Excitebike course using the same track pieces you see in the pre-built levels. You can customize how many laps a course has, place pieces pretty far apart or packed in tight, and the game will even try to generate a best guess record time for the course so you have a goal to aim for. Building a good level probably requires the same kind of game knowledge that would make it easy for you to overcome its trials though, but that doesn’t diminish the fact that even if you understand the layout you still have to be able to nail the evening out of your bike and choosing when to speed up. Custom levels can be played both with or without the enemy bikers in play, but despite supposedly featuring a Save and Load feature, this was a remnant of the Japanese release where a unique peripheral allowed such preservation. Here, the course will disappear when the game is turned off, and it can’t really be shared with others unless the person is in the same room as you. Some future releases rectify issues involving the saving of courses, but the original game’s course editor can feel like you’re sitting there plonking down pieces for a while only to get a course that probably won’t feel too unique since your tool kit’s pieces don’t have room for interactions deeper than what the main tracks already feature.

THE VERDICT: Excitebike’s pool of tracks is certainly shallow, but there’s just enough depth to their design and how you interact with them that this motorcycle game still has some energy to it. The harder records require you to get a good feel for when to boost and how you should even out during a landing, and while the track piece catalogue isn’t too large, the pieces are linked together in challenging enough ways to make trying to beat the best time a bit engaging. The track designer doesn’t feel like it can squeeze much more out of the format than the pre-made tracks have but it does give you something extra to tinker with in the same way Selection B’s additional racers can throw in new but minor variables. Longevity isn’t its strong suit, but what it does with its small batch of ideas and the small variations between modes mean Excitebike is still a decent time while it lasts.

And so, I give Excitebike for the Nintendo Entertainment System…

An OKAY rating. The gameplay mechanics certainly help Excitebike overcome how few tracks it has. Just because track pieces start to become pretty recognizable doesn’t mean you can afford to approach them the same way, the player having to adjust how they tip their bike based on what is placed ahead of a launcher or bump as well. The two speed variations really adds that extra layer to the action that keeps it from running dry sooner. Those best times definitely involved someone with a knowledge of when to gun the engine and when to hold back, so figuring out how to use your speed boosts becomes just as much a part of truly beating the five tracks as landing safely after a jump is. The create a course feature is definitely not a bad thing even though only really simple ideas like stringing similar things together over and over really manage to feel like distinctly different concepts then what the game showcases elsewhere, but Excitebike is definitely aching for true multiplayer where you could more meaningfully interfere with another racer or compete on custom tracks where neither player can have too much of an advantage from previous practice. More tracks and more pieces also comes to mind, although since Excitebike is a game early out of the gate for the system there wasn’t too much of an understanding of what was possible within the space yet. Additions would be easy to propose, but it at least made decent use of what the creators knew was possible on the system to provide us with an NES launch game that can still hold up well enough under modern scrutiny.

Excitebike’s smooth scrolling was actually key to letting Mario do the same in his landmark title since the game engine featured here was reused for Super Mario Bros., but even in the title it debuted with that allowed Excitebike to keep its focus on managing speed and positioning without any hindrances to the process. You are in control of your bike and mastering it to beat those best times means Excitebike isn’t simply a game where you can jump in and easily complete the five tracks first try, so while it may not have the breadth of content to make for longer play sessions, the core concepts mean it can provide a bit of fun in small bursts.