You can play Mario Kart 64 in stunning HD with this fan-made texture pack
The Nintendo 64 fan scene has been busy as hell lately, with the PC port of Zelda: Ocarina of Time finally live – and getting tons of fun and quirky mods – and rumored to have even more games to be made available thanks to reverse engineering. . However, next on the list is a very slick and shiny update to the beloved party game.
The Mario Kart 64 HD fan group has been hard at work creating an HD texture pack for Mario Kart 64, and over the weekend, the group announced that they had finished recreating all the characters. Now you can race as your favorite driver in beautiful HD quality:
Looks cool, doesn’t it? The full package is almost ready – and as the video on Twitter shows, every game asset will be updated. This means that even items like shells and banana peels will be remastered in HD. Not a single stone will remain unturned.
The group uses the game’s title screen and promotional images to tell them what the models, courses, and items should look like. The team has been working on this for several years with various updates, but this last one looks like the hottest. Heck, even the menu is changing!
It’s amazing to see how much smoother Mario Kart 64 HD has become, and it really makes a difference. But the real discovery is seeing portraits and characters from the HD pack and the original game side by side. The difference is stunning:
Basically, we are big fans of everything we have seen here. It looks exactly like we imagined it as kids on our CRT screens!
While the character models are available for download, the rest of the pack is still a work in progress. And, again, this is another release that is possible thanks to the fruits of all this reverse engineering. You can check which packages are available on GitHubor join Mario Kart 64 HD Discord to get more information.
Let us know what you think of this beautiful texture pack in the comments!
