Almost a decade after release, footage of Mario Kart Wii’s scrapped mission mode has been found by MrBean35000vr.
MrBean35000vr explained
So, you may be wondering, how has nobody found this before now? The reason all this took so long to find is just because the game doesn’t try to load these screens at all, ever, even on the menus that would once upon a time have contained them. So in order to get at them, you’d have to convince the game it was supposed to load them first, which I did, and then politely asking them to render actually works! Moreover, these screens change the game state into an unused mode, similar yet different to that of Competition and Tournaments, revealing a bunch of features that were once part of Mario Kart DS, hiding away in the depths of Mario Kart Wii’s code.
The menus for Mission Mode have no available text, but the game is trying to load them; they’ve simply been erased. Similarly, a massive file that would’ve contained mission parameters is not present, and without it, the mode can’t start – UNLESS you simulate its existence, which is what I did. It attempts to load files out of the /Race/MissionRun folder on the disc, but that folder is empty, but that affects nothing since that folder would only have contained extra data (like where to place goombas or similar). As such, I was actually able to play a few games with the game in Misson state, and show off some of the game modes.
This is really cool, and a mission mode is something that is missed in recent entries after being in Mario Kart DS. Hopefully in Mario Kart 9, it will make a return.