One night this previous summer, I got together with some of my buddies that i graduated with to hang out and play video games before we all left for school. It took us a good half hour to figure out what game that we wanted to play and my one friend suggested that we try to beat Crash Team Racing all in one night and all of us passionately agreed to that suggestion.
Crash Team Racing for Playstation 1
All of us loved that game for playstation one when we were little kids. So we started playing around 10 pm that evening and we did not stop the entire night. We were really getting into the game (screaming at the TV, rage quitting races, etc…). When it was about 4 o’clock the next morning we finally unlocked the last world of races, (you have to get keys to unlock the next world by winning certain races) we beat all of the bosses but the last one and his name is Nitrous Oxide. When we finally won all of the races in the final world and got the last key it was finally time to race Nitrous Oxide. At that moment, the amount of endogenous value was through the roof.
Nitrous Oxide is a alien from another planet who believes in the theory of “survival of the fastest”. What that means is that he goes from planet to planet and races each planet’s best driver. If the driver wins, he will leave the planet in peace. If Nirtous wins, he turns the planet into a parking lot pretty much and enslaves the planet’s natives. So this guy was not playing around, he meant business.
Nitrous Oxide
The boss races in CTR are a 1 versus 1 head-to-head race but every time a boss collects a mystery crate, they unlock their special power and use it against you to slow you down during the race. Usually when a player collects a mystery crate you get just one power up or special to use one time, then you have to get another crate. When Nitrous Oxide gets a crate he becomes OP pretty much. He gets all of the power ups and an unlimited use of them. So all you can do is try to dodge all of his attacks and try to hit him with your power ups and try to slow him down. Me and my buddies went in to the race confident and thought it was not going to be a problem just like all of the other bosses throughout the game but we were sadly mistaken. For the first like 10 races all of us got our salads tossed and all we wanted to do is beat the darn game and go to bed. All of us were screaming and yelling at each other because we kept on losing this one race.
Around 4:30 a.m. our food rations from sheetz had just about run out and we were starting to doze off and trying to not fall asleep I grabbed the controller in desperation and i got in the mental state of winning this race. After 6 and a half hours of unlocking worlds, crazy finishes, and almost losing friendships, I finally beat Nitrous Oxide in the final race. I saved our planets race from being enslaved by aliens from space, I was the big hero.
This game had great mechanics throughout its story. Having to get keys to unlock new worlds made the game more difficult and fun to play. The story was simple, but effective. The game was probably made for pre-teens at the time and it could be understood universally by anyone no matter how old. For being a game from 1999 its aesthetics were actually pretty good. My friends and i actually forgot how good the graphics were for Playstation 1. The worlds and tracks were very appealing to the eye and creatively designed.
I would be interested to hear more about how the game managed to instill so much value into this race. Here is what I’m getting based on your post. First, it had a lot of value because you’d invested so much time into even getting an opportunity to race against Nitrous Oxide. You’d been playing it for hours and hours. The final race had a lot of value, therefore, because it kind of validated the whole night. If you didn’t beat it, that would’ve been time wasted.
The game’s story reinforced the value a bit as well. In the story, not winning the race meant the death of the world, which, you know, is kind of a big deal.
Also, some of the mechanics that were specific to this race also reinforced its values. If I’m reading you correctly, then the game gave preferential treatment to Nitrous Oxide in terms of the randomized power ups that were available in the game. Previously, they’d been randomized, but in this last race Nitrous Oxide always got the best drops, and could keep these benefits for the entirety of the race, whereas the player had to make do with less useful ones. This change in mechanics made the race a lot more difficult, but it also made the value of winning it that much higher.
Is that right?
Were there other things in the race that added to its value? For example, you mention that the game’s aesthetics as a whole were surprisingly good–that its held up really well for a PS1 game. Was there anything particularly eye catching about the final race that distinguished it from others? Was the race course unusually difficult? Did it have features to it that made it particularly dramatic to race through? Did Nitrous Oxide have another abilities that distinguished this race from others in the game?