I have a modern PAL tv where I play Super Mario 64 Japanese version. If I play the game on a NTSC tv does the game go faster?

Good question. Well, the frequency of the frames IS faster on TV's from US and Japan, where both are showing 30 frames per second. While our European TVs (PAL), have 24fps.

This results in everything going slightly faster on NTSC, so I would say yes as of this. But a better question might be; Is it the console or the monitor which decides the speed?

As an example, if you play on emulator, you can use a screen that easily can run 60fps, but the US and Japanese versions of the game are still faster than the European version of sm64, as the fps rate is equal to the ones played on the original consoles. But this is important: You can't just magically run it on 60fps! If that was so, then the game would be twice as fast, and a 20 minutes 16 star run would now be 10 minutes! And this is also the reason why speedrunners don't ever use the European version. The game would be too slow, and they would lose time that's not directly the player's fault.

So I hope someone else can answer this, is it the TV or the console that decides the speed of the gameplay? My intuition says that it should be faster, but my intuition sucks and should never be trusted.

Its the console that decides the speed of the game, not the monitor. The most late 90s or early 2000s european CRTs support 50/60Hz video outputs just fine and pal/secam/ntsc formats. Also there's also PAL60 standard as well, but it wasn't used for N64 games so its natural that newer PAL crts support 60hz output too. .

Thanks for clearing that up!

I would like to add that if you are trying to get a CRT TV (like you should if you want low input lag) in Europe, not all of them will be able to display NTSC signal with color. I've heard Japanese brands, like Panasonic, Sony, etc, are often able to display both PAL and NTSC in color, so if you can find one like that's probably your best bet.

I am confused, so no matter of what Tv I use, everything depends on the version of the game and of the console?