Unused Beta Mission Mode Has Been Discovered In Mario Kart Wii

People often discover interesting things about games that do not come to light until years after the specific title’s release. One such game is the immensely popular Mario Kart Wii. YouTuber MrBean35000vr has discovered something that no-one other than the developers were aware of and that’s that Mario Kart Wii contains an unused beta mission mode that was scrapped from the game. The user has provided more details regarding how he came to find this unknown mission mode. Read on for more!

So, this is some cut or beta content from Mario Kart Wii – originally there was a Mission Mode planned for the game, and for the first time, the interfaces for it have been found and shown in all their slightly incomplete glory!

For those who don’t know what Mission Mode is, it was present in Mario Kart DS. It was a series of challenges that saw you doing things like racing through gates, beating boss racers, and things like that. Competition/Tournament mode was the spiritual successor to it.

So, you may be wondering, how has nobody found this before now? The reason all this took so long to find is just because the game doesn’t try to load these screens at all, ever, even on the menus that would once upon a time have contained them. So in order to get at them, you’d have to convince the game it was supposed to load them first, which I did, and then politely asking them to render actually works! Moreover, these screens change the game state into an unused mode, similar yet different to that of Competition and Tournaments, revealing a bunch of features that were once part of Mario Kart DS, hiding away in the depths of Mario Kart Wii’s code.

The menus for Mission Mode have no available text, but the game is trying to load them; they’ve simply been erased. Similarly, a massive file that would’ve contained mission parameters is not present, and without it, the mode can’t start – UNLESS you simulate its existence, which is what I did. It attempts to load files out of the /Race/MissionRun folder on the disc, but that folder is empty, but that affects nothing since that folder would only have contained extra data (like where to place goombas or similar). As such, I was actually able to play a few games with the game in Misson state, and show off some of the game modes.

The game modes include:

– Get miniturbos to score points
– Get item boxes to score points
– Kill enemies to score points
– Wheelie to score points
– Kill topmen to score points
– Gather coins (not shown here)
– Pass through gates (not shown here)
– Complete 3 laps within time limit (not shown here)

There are at least 13 valid modes, so that’s only 8 of them. I’m still working out what the rest of them do! I have also now confirmed adding SZS files to MissionRun under the right names does yield very good results, and allows many tournaments to be played as standalone missions. They’re pretty good for testing, given they’re very similar in format!

So, I hope you enjoy the video and find it as interesting as I found discovering it was! I will be doing more research into this mode and what other things may be hidden away in it. And indeed what other things might be hiding in Mario Kart Wii itself. If we can find something like this after 10 years, what else might still be out there?

Thanks to CodyMKW for the tip!