Since 3D Crazy Coaster graced the Vectrex in 1983, theme park video games have come in two flavors – simulation and minigame collection. Disney’s done both, from Adventures in the Magic Kingdom on the Nintendo Entertainment System to the Coaster series on PC. There are highs and lows of both styles – Virtual Magic Kingdom, a glorified ad campaign, was so beloved it lives on as a fan-made recreation – but it’s the outliers that are most interesting.
Of those few, Walt Disney World Quest: Magical Racing Tour is the farthest afield. It’s also a contradiction down to its CD-ROM soul – a one-of-a-kind knockoff.
Without Super Mario Kart, there would be no Mario Kart 64, but without Mario Kart 64, there would be no kart racing as we know it.
Released in all territories within six months of the Nintendo 64’s release, Mario Kart 64 provided the new console with its first multiplayer killer app. Instead of taking impatient turns running around Super Mario 64, players could now run into three other friends simultaneously. It wasn’t just more play for the money – it was free advertising for Nintendo’s 3D miracle machine and boy did it work.
Mario Kart 64 remains the second best-selling game of its console and the fourth of its generation. The legacy of the series, twelve releases and four generations later, is unquestionable.
The fallout of the series is a lot easier to question.
What do Smurfs, M&Ms, and the Burger King have in common? They all starred in their own kart racing games, for better or mostly worse. Mario Kart 64 started a licensing gold rush. Every company, ad campaign, and out-of-fashion cartoon with a cast of marketable characters got in on the fun. The best pretenders to the throne came from within the medium – Diddy Kong Racing on Nintendo 64 and Crash Team Racing on PlayStation. Everything else was a crapshoot. Flawed standouts took inspiration from floundering multimedia franchises (Muppet RaceMania) and inherently plotless toylines (Lego Racers).
And then there’s Walt Disney World Quest: Magical Racing Tour, the only Mario Kart knock-off based on a theme park. Stranger yet, it doesn’t even pass the “cast of marketable characters” test.
If gamers wanted to personally run Donald Duck off the road, they’d have to wait until Christmas 2000 for Mickey’s Speedway USA. The game with Disney in title shipped months earlier with no playable racers more famous than Chip or Dale.
Given the proximity and blindspots of the titles, it’s not hard to see a contractual symbiosis between Mickey’s Speedway USA and Walt Disney World Quest: Magical Racing Tour.
Speedway was developed by the legendary Rare, then-veterans of Diddy Kong Racing and soon-to-be famous for Banjo-Kazooie, only for the Nintendo 64. It made sense for all parties involved. Disney put its most famous characters in the hands of the most famous kart-racing studio for a stacked-deck debut on the console most famous for kart-racing.
Walt Disney World Quest feels like leftovers by contrast. Chip, Dale, and Jiminy Cricket are the only household names in the roster. Besides his triune silhouette, Mickey Mouse is entirely MIA. Crystal Dynamics, riding high off its Gex series, handled development despite little racing experience. It was eventually released on all major contemporary consoles except the Nintendo 64.
Time and the internet have been kind to Mickey’s Speedway USA, a solid entry in a beloved genre by a beloved developer on a beloved console. It’s the kind of game tailormade for “hidden gem” re-examination, despite critics at the time taking issue with its bland simplicity.
Time and the internet both seem to have forgotten Walt Disney World Quest: Magical Racing Tour. Archived reviews only gave it exhausted endorsement – IGN hedged its thumbs-up with, “Nobody NEEDS another Kart racing game.” The occasional YouTuber plays it for a lark now and again. But by and large, Magical Racing Tour doesn’t have nearly the nostalgic prestige of Speedway and that’s an absolute crime.
There may be no greater must-play for Walt Disney World die-hards.
The story centers on a one-off piece of park lore – the Walt Disney World Magic Machine. It looks like a Mary Blair moonlander and makes the fireworks, uh, work. When Chip and Dale, still observing Rescue Rangers dress code, find the contraption behind Cinderella Castle, they do what any self-respecting guests would: stuff it so full of nuts the thing implodes.
The quest in Walt Disney World Quest is to find the scattered debris before showtime, wherever it may have landed on property. Fear not, though – there’s no time limit here. The plot’s just an excuse for Eddie Carroll, the longest-serving Jiminy Cricket, to spin the opening cutscene like a fairytale and then get out of the road. The crucial difference between Magical Racing Tour and Speedway, not to mention its knock-off colleagues, is that the courses are the characters.
The actual characters, on the other hand, are oddball one-offs made with refreshingly little eye for action figure sales. Most are derived from the black-nosed Disney genus of “Dogs, probably” and all are defined by their love of Walt Disney World. Baron Karlott lives for the Haunted Mansion, though the state of his mortality is up for debate. Polly Roger brings her own sword on Pirates of the Caribbean. Bruno Biggs appears to be Pete’s illegitimate son. There’s an unlockable RoboCop duck. They may not be famous, but like real theme park superfans, at least they’re strange.
Not that it takes a theme park superfan to appreciate these scenic routes.
There are 13 tracks waiting to be bested and unlocked in Walt Disney World Quest, each based on another piece of the most magical place on earth. Most are straight adaptations of rides – the holy trinity of Mountains, DINOSAUR, etc. – but a few are Tony Hawk-style playgrounds for collecting coins – Test Track, Disney Studios, Typhoon Lagoon. Each comes complete with its own custom vehicle, so if you’ve ever wanted to drift a Doom Buggy, start scouring Ebay.
More so than most racers of the era, arguably more than even Mario Kart 64, these courses live and breathe. A brontosaurus bows its Chevy-sized head over the action in DINOSAUR. The Jungle Cruise weaves its straightaways and shortcuts together into a honeycomb delta, forcing racers to explore for faster lap times. That rarest of Disney cryptids, Lagoona Gator, makes a polygonal appearance cheering on passing boaters. Not every track is created equal – the Tomorrowland Speedway is a bit boring by default – and the representation is noticeably lopsided – Animal Kingdom and Epcot only get one course each – but there’s remarkable TLC across the board.
The end credits give thanks to Disney Imagineering and the assistance shows.
Wherever possible, the music is pulled straight from the source. Space Mountain uses Aarin Richard’s 1996 score for the Disneyland version, featuring the unmistakable surf sounds of Dick Dale. “Yo, Ho!” and “Grim Grinning Ghosts” are the archival originals. Today, Magical Racing Tour lives on as a rare historical record of the original Test Track’s queue music in all its banging, clanging glory. Fair warning: the menu music is an endless loop of “It’s A Small World,” though it is graciously instrumental. Wherever licensing or a lack of recognizable themes precluded authenticity, most noticeably on Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster and Blizzard Beach, Crystal Dynamics substituted songs from past titles like Gex: Enter the Gecko that work just fine.
Disney veterans should already recognize some of the geography. The Haunted Mansion track follows the Magic Kingdom layout all the way down to the entrance awning, minus the later interactive queue. The exit stairs for the Tomorrowland Speedway hide boosters at the top. If you haven’t launched your snowmobile off Summit Plummet after the first lap, then you have to try harder to find its hidden entrance.
To the credit of everyone involved, Walt Disney World Quest: Magical Racing Tour is an absolute love letter to its source material. Even the voices are spot-on – Eddie Carroll, Tress MacNeille, and Corey Burton return as Jiminy Cricket, Chip, and Dale, respectively. It might not have the vicarious thrill of a dedicated simulation game, but there’s no arguing with the easy, breezy charm of kart racing.
And make no mistake – Magical Racing Tour is a good kart racer. It boasts some of the tightest handling outside the Nintendo and Sony franchises, even with a directional pad instead of a control stick. The weapon pick-ups should be familiar to any Mario Kart veterans, but with Disney twists. Instead of shells, there are acorns. Instead of a lightning bolt shrinking all players but one, a curse reduces them to slow-hopping frogs. Whatever you do, don’t drive into the teacups. Collectable fairies introduce the novel concept of luck. The more you powerslide into, the better your odds of getting that clutch pick-up and the worse your opponents’ odds of doing the same. If there’s an asterisk or Achilles Heel to the game it’s that players need all the luck they can get.
A common criticism of Mickey’s Speedway USA is that it’s not an especially challenging game.
By contrast, Walt Disney World Quest: Magical Racing Tour is ruthless. The AI is always out for blood. On the later, harder tracks, shortcuts are the only way to survive. Decorated drivers can theoretically unlock all the courses in one hour and the characters in two. Anyone with less experience behind the wheel should expect to see a lot of Blizzard Beach and DINOSAUR before the rest of the World opens up. For the sake of this article, I went back to play my copy and spent an hour grinding through the first round of courses alone.
On account, oddly enough, it’s not a great kart racer for little kids. Multiplayer? Sure, there’s no harm in that, but you can only race on the tracks that have already been earned in story mode. The difficulty cliff is just as liable to break controllers as it is to build character -the reward of a virtual Walt Disney World vacation may just be enough to keep playing.
Unlike Mickey’s Speedway USA, which warmed Toys R Us shelves well into the Gamecube era, Walt Disney World Quest: Magical Racing Tour is an actual hidden gem. Despite its strange focus or maybe because of it, the game is rarely included in discussions of the PlayStation’s best racers. If forum posts are anything to go on, there’s little nostalgia for it even among the Disney parks faithful. It deserved better and still does.
Walt Disney World Quest: Magical Racing Tour is likely the best of its kind. Simulation games aren’t for everyone and minigame collections get old fast. Twenty years after its release, Magical Racing Tour has only aged gracefully. There may be more to love now than at the time, given the additions and subtractions of the resort since. Kart racing isn’t as hot as it used to be. There will always be Mario Kart, forever and ever, amen. But something this singular and strange and, against all odds, superbly done is rarer than ever, especially carrying the rubber-stamp of a company like Disney.
There will never be another Walt Disney World Quest and that’s a genuine shame. We could all stand to drift a Doom Buggy, now more than ever.
