Before speedrunning had polished leaderboards, video proof standards, Discord servers, and frame-by-frame analysis, Mario Kart 64 players were already tearing courses apart and passing discoveries around by email.
David Wonn’s comprehensive Mario Kart 64 shortcuts page is still online.
The page reads like field notes from the first generation of serious glitch hunters. Each shortcut has instructions, an inventor when one is known, an approximate discovery date, and often a story explaining how the trick moved through the community.
The dates are the best part. Many discoveries cluster in 1997, essentially right on top of the game’s North American release. Luigi Raceway wall jumps, Kalimari Desert lap tricks, Toad’s Turnpike warps, Frappe Snowland lap skips, Choco Mountain wall jumps, and Wario Stadium abuse were being tested while most players were still learning the tracks normally.
Wonn did not merely collect the final tricks. He kept provenance.
For Luigi Raceway, he credits Jeos Oreamuno and explains how he reconstructed the trick after receiving a description by email. For Toad’s Turnpike, Wonn records the reveal date as March 12, 1997 and links to his original email describing the discovery. Other entries distinguish between tricks he found independently, shortcuts posted first on N64HQ, rumors that had not yet been reproduced, and techniques discovered by several people around the same time.
That is primitive but recognizable speedrunning methodology: establish the claim, reproduce it, separate rumor from confirmed technique, preserve who found what, and argue about whether the resulting time should count.
The page even has a dedicated rumors section. A supposed shortcut could live there while people experimented. If it turned out to be repeatable, it graduated into the legitimate list. If it failed long enough, it disappeared.
No database schema was required. HTML and reputation did the job.
Wonn’s page also preserves a social layer modern gaming databases often flatten away. He remembers local tournaments, Nintendo Power coverage, secret techniques held back for years, arguments over credit, and the excitement of discovering that Lakitu’s rescue logic could be weaponized against the course itself.
This is why an old strategy page can matter after every shortcut has been rediscovered on video. The modern clip shows how. The old page remembers when people first realized it was possible.
Read through the original shortcut archive, especially the comments under each technique. CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list has more gaming pages from the period when discoveries traveled from controller to email inbox to hand-written HTML.