This is the history of the speedruns of Polaris Snocross on the Nintendo 64.
Well after a decade after it's release in February 2000 Polaris Snocross had been looked over by N64 time trials players attracted to other racing titles on the platform. Coming too late into the console life cycle where it was drowning in competition it never made it to the public consiousness.
In 2018, this all changed with the arrival of Caseywho, a speedrunner who had begun a journey speedrunning achieving several records on other games for setting his sights on a game from his childhood: Polaris Snocross!
November 17th Caseywho made a video request to the speedrun.com moderators to add a leaderboard. In this video he showcases the game with a Sport Tournament Speedrun without a memory card. He explains some of the basic elements of the tournament mode speedruns like stunts, placing requirements, and basic mechanics. His leaderboard request was approved the very next day on November 18th 2018
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On the following 3 days Caseywho began populating the leaderboards with times using the 800 XC Sled. By Nov 20th he had filled in each of the time trial leaderboards and the Sport, Semi-Pro, and Pro Tournament categories setting the standards for runs to come.
On Nov 21st, Caseywho came back to earlier courses to implement time saves he knew were possible with the faster but more difficult to control Sno-Razor sled.
His first run submitted that day broke the 3 minute barrier on the very first course Bear River; showing the increased speed of the Sno-Razor in action! Also posting a 58 lap the first sub 1 min lap.
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Utilizing the Sno-Razor more, Caseywho also posted a run of 2:20.50 on Geyser Canyon showcasing a new skip saving a whopping 6 seconds off his previous run and opening up the course significantly for improvement!
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After improving some of his IL records with Sno-Razor Caseywho set his sight on using his updated routing and practice to take time off of Sport Tournament shaving 31 seconds from his previous run.
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Around this time late November - Early December 2018 Caseywho was watching Wave Race 64 streams and discussing the game with the community. From these discussions suggestions had been made from those runners to try 1st person mode and also to turn off music both in order to improve the framerate resulting in faster times.
Caseywho tested these options and HUD off in 2 runs on December 5th and 6th. He noted that the game felt a bit faster with these options and completed a 2 second PB on Frozen Falls with a 2:48 bringing the time under 2:50 for the first time.
His second run was a small PB on Bear River using the same experimental settings to test. He notes in his video that the hit detection seems very different in 1st person but wasn't sure if it's faster or not.
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