Original Release: Nintendo, 1984, Arcade / NES
Other Releases: PC-88 (1985), Nintendo 64 (in Excitebike 64 – 2000), Gamecube (in Animal Crossing – 2001), GBA (2004), Wii (2007), 3DS (2011)
Nintendo’s simple dirtbike racer was one of the first big sports hits for the then-new NES.
Excitebike (NES, Nintendo, 1984)
Where to Buy: Amazon
How to Emulate: coming soon!
Review by: C. M0use
Nintendo was pretty bad at sports titles in the early NES era, though they kept gamely pumping them out. Excitebike was one of their better efforts as it wasn’t exactly a sports sim, though it did admirably capture something of the feeling of bouncing around on individual dirt bike wheels and the general physics (for a 1984 console title at least). The smooth and fast scrolling was also a technical feat for the time, and one that directly led to the creation of Super Mario Bros.
The downside is you get a mere five tracks to play with, which each last just a little over a minute if you’re doing pretty well at them. You can pick from Mode A or Mode B to take them on; Mode A lets you go solo while Mode B adds other racers to the mix. I always found Mode B to be too much clutter, and there’s always that one guy who is the most obvious rubberbander of all time (immediately matching your speed boosts as soon as you use them like he’s tethered to you). I think the most frustrating thing is there’s no point to beating these guys at all, it’s still all about racking up the best time, they’re just there to gum up the works and annoy you.
Thanks to the attention to detail in the bike physics, cute appearance and some pretty solid course design, it’s some amount of fun to play. It was released at a time when highly repetitive Atari 2600 games were still the console norm, though, so it just doesn’t have a lot of meat to it. The inclusion of a basic course design mode was supposed to fill this void, and while it’s impressive for 1984 it’s still pretty limited and not the most intuitive thing in the world.
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