Excitebots: One of the Best Racing Games Doomed at Release

October 25th, 2022

The year is 2009. Nintendo is currently dominating the video game market thanks to the Wii and DS, with Super Smash Brothers Brawl, Kirby Super Star Ultra, and Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers being talks of the town. And for non-Nintendo markets, Left 4 Dead, Spore, Metal Gear Solid 4, LittleBigPlanet, Mass Effect, and Halo Wars were all leaving their own splashes (among many others). With so many landmark titles releasing at the end of 2008 and start of 2009, it’s no wonder why a game in one of Nintendo’s more obscure franchises bombed after getting next to no attention.

Excitebots: Trick Racing is a sequel to the Excite series dating back to 1983’s Excitebike for the NES. It featured frantic gameplay where you motocross-raced across bumpy tracks, with the main challenge being angling yourself just right to maintain and control your speed. While more obscure now, Excitebike was by no means a small title and sold a whopping 4.16 million copies at the time, ending up as one of the system’s best-sellers. It earned a number of sequels and re-releases over the years, with Nintendo eventually trusting studio Monster Games (known for NASCAR games) with the IP.

Excite Truck was their first spin, with it going for a unique point-based system (via stars) that prioritized playing well slightly over being the fastest. Stunts, angling yourself well with motion controls, smashing into opponents, etc. will all contribute to your total score and potentially compensate if you don’t finish first. Placing higher will net you more stars, but so long as you’re good at the game, you have more freedom to screw around. While only selling a fraction of Excitebike’s numbers at ~0.5 million, they still did well enough to warrant making a direct follow-up. One that allowed Monster Games to take things in a much wackier direction.

Excitebots launched on the Wii April 20th, 2009 in North America, with it coming to Japan later on August 30th, 2011. Right off the bat, you can probably guess that something’s up with such a huge difference and no European release, but I’ll touch on that later. For now, let’s focus on what makes Excitebots so outstanding.

Rather than using bikes, trucks, or even cars, Excitebots has you using robots themed after teeny animals and insects that scuttle along the course at breakneck speeds. The point system is back and serves as both a way to gauge your ranking on tracks as well as purchasing unlockables.

B ranks are simple enough and serve to unlock the next set of courses, while S ranks are harder challenges that require collecting as many stars as possible via optimized routes. On top of driving, boosting, jumping off ledges to perform tricks, and angling yourself via the Wii remote’s motion controls, there are a number of quick microgames you do on the track to earn points and zoom ahead.

While that may sound daunting at first, they’re quick little things to help shake up gameplay rather than disrupt the flow with a different control scheme. Sometimes there’s a goal with a soccer ball you can ram your bot into, while in other cases it’s something more challenging like angling your robot between tight forests where you could easily lose a point streak or crash by hitting trees. Other times it’s weirder tasks like angling yourself on a grind rail to make a sandwich or hitting a floating clown head with a pie to unlock an alternate route.

Every track has its own mix of gimmicks, which helps the game feel fresh and absurdly fast-paced. In harder difficulties when you’re constantly boosting, slamming into competitors, and doing tricks every 20 seconds, you’d think you were playing a Sonic game with how lightning-fast it feels. Almost every course also only lasts 2 laps, which helps at things not dragging too much.

Mostly.

While B ranks unlock the next set of courses, getting S ranks in every course is required to unlock the harder Super Excite and Mirror modes, which serve as your main form of progression. In normal Excite mode, this is fairly balanced and can be earned with just about any bot so long as you’re attentive and doing well on the random microgames. For the latter modes, however, they demand near-perfection and knowing that some routes will inevitably give more stars than others. Which can be annoying when you try to get really good at one route only to discover you’re a buffoon, but path optimization in a racing game is hardly anything new.

Beyond that, buying things with stars and unlocking skins by playing as bots repeatedly acts as the true endgame.

I also can’t ignore that local multiplayer doesn’t count towards progression at all, which feels very weird in a game where there are so many modes you can easily farm stars in a faster manner. Perhaps this was done to prevent people from racking up hundreds of stars via slamming into each other for the entirety of the race? It’s hard to say, but doesn’t do the game any favors when the best way to unlock vehicles/paints and grind stars is to play one track repeatedly.

There used to be 6-player online where you could gamble stars and get numbers in the millions according to one player (message 5), but that’s long gone with Nintendo’s crusty old Wii servers. Wiimmfi has technically restored them for Excitebots, but unless you organize a party then it’s still a fairly dead scene. Not to mention that fan-made servers requiring you to hack your console isn’t the most accessible option for most people. That said, there are two other modes that go towards unlocking things: Poker Race and Minigames.

Minigames are what you would expect: the same ones found in the race, but with several in a row to test your skills and help you get better with a lot of the small challenges. So if you say, aren’t the best at nailing a soccer goal, you can do the Soccer minigame and try to nail 10 goals under a time limit.

Poker Race is a whole new mode where the gimmick is exactly as it sounds: playing poker while you race! It sounds goofy, and it 100% is, but like the rest of the game is an interesting enough concept to where it just works. You’re given a set of 4 cards and are able to pick up more on the track, with them being visible ahead of time. It’s up to you to think about your current hand, look ahead, think about the most optimal card to pick up, and then swiftly press A to cash in your cards for stars. There are only 3 tracks to pick from and the online situation is the same as before, but it’s still a neat little novelty overall.

In terms of graphics, the game goes for a stylized look in spite of representing real-world locations for most tracks. Everything looks vibrant, and the game having slight blur while your cars squash-and-stretch helps you really feel the speed. The game strikes a good balance of (mostly) grounded depictions of countries with a dash of cartoon-y elements like Moai heads or tar fossils coming to life to mess with the track.

Also on the subject of representing countries, the soundtrack is shockingly great. Composed by Masaru Tajima and Shinji Ushiroda, each location is given its own unique feel while tying it all together with a heavy emphasis on electronic, rock, and usage of synth. I’m far from a musical expert, but I love how it occasionally uses instruments associated with the country (like Scotland with dubstep bagpipes) or just freestyles it based on vibes (such as Finland and Mexico). It’s all very out-there in the best way possible, and the game dramatically lowering the volume when making a large jump and having it rush back when you land makes it feel all the more impactful.

However, there’s one final component I’ve still yet to talk about: the game’s unfortunate failure. Excitebots sold around 280,000 copies total, with the game only releasing in North America and Japan as a Club Nintendo reward in August 2011 — nearly 2.5 years later. Its launch was so bad that when looking up sales figures, the first result is an article that talks about how hard it bombed.

The reasoning behind it? Part of it is due to the game’s incredibly lackluster marketing. This is personal bias, but I don’t remember ever seeing marketing for the game at the time on TV or in game stores. While it did get two trailers, you may notice that neither are from Nintendo themselves and are just archived uploads. It’s worth noting IGN also uploaded the latter trailer, but received less views and can be seen as a semi-accurate view of how many people saw it at the time. The most attention it seemed to get was being put on the front of the Wii’s website back around the time of launch.

As for the other major factor, anyone who knows anything about the Wii can probably list off a few major releases. Wii Sports, Wii Fit, and, if they’re with the in-crowd and know some hidden underground hits, Mario Kart Wii. You know, the console’s 2nd-best selling game and the 17th-best selling game of all time at roughly 37 million copies sold? That came out in 2008 almost exactly a year before Excitebots, and no other racing game could touch it at the time. Wii’s were bundled with it, Nintendo pushed it for years, it got a gimmicky Wii wheel accessory for an extra sales push, the list goes on. And if you were a poor smaller developer working with a lesser-known franchise going up against a juggernaut like that on its home console…well, I’d feel really sorry for you.

It wasn’t even considered to be released in Australia, and they seemingly didn’t release it in Europe without so much of a statement. Even a Nintendo Power review from May 2009 (page 87) graded it lower than Excite Truck despite finding it better, because Mario Kart Wii created, “stiffer competition.” Looking back at the Wii’s best-selling list again, you might notice that not a single other racing game is up there. Despite being a different type of racer, Mario Kart Wii sat on a throne of its own.

So, where does that leave Excitebots now? Or the Excite franchise as a whole? Monster Games released a remake of the original Excitebike as WiiWare in November 2009, around 7 months later. After that, they helped Nintendo with a number of misc. 3DS and Wii U games before going back to making NASCAR titles. The Excite series has lain dormant ever since.

While not the most uplifting note, there is one upside to such a fun game selling like hot garbage: it’s still easily accessible today! Copies on eBay seem to go for around $12–15 complete-in-box, with Amazon and even Walmart still having it listed for roughly $30. Emulation also exists for the more daring crowd. Even if the official online is dead, Excitebots still makes for a really fun game with friends or solo. Once you start, you won’t want to put it down.