The Secret of Choco Mountain

 

Watch a muted time trial with some Silent Hill BGM and you're halfway to the best creepypasta of 2011.

Choco Mountain is a weird course. The blank textures and low-render fog give the track a desolate feel. There's not much to show for an allegedly chocolate-themed track. Really, it's just kind of a dirt road surrounded by brown walls. Oh, and some chocolatey-looking boulders, I guess.

Is the whole area supposed to be made out of literal chocolate? All available evidence points towards no, which strikes me as decidedly joyless, considering the rest of the series. Apparently, the area is merely "chocolate-colored," according to Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. Play Nintendo even issued a PSA when announcing the course back in 2022 that Choco Mountain "is not edible."

We are meant to assume a connection between Choco Mountain and Choco Island of Super Mario World, which had previously spawned a couple of equally wasteland-ish Super Mario Kart tracks (well, okay, all the tracks in that game feel like wastelands). The yellow sky and blocky hills especially call to mind Chocolate Island 5 from SMW. This is made more apparent in the three facelifts the track has gotten, first in Mario Kart Tour, then Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and most recently in Mario Kart World (I'm not counting Mario Kart DS's version, which is essentially unchanged).

MKT adds in some details (a foggy vista! tunnel supports! a crystal-encrusted cavern!) that give the track some flavor and move it more towards a "mining zone" feel, which MK8D doubled down on with some signage indicating that it's a Shy Guy-owned metal mine. Which is fine. MKW, though, goes off in a totally different direction by making it a mud-filled monster truck arena. Gone are the atmospheric dead trees, gone are the exposed fossils (a nice touch given its Dinosaur Land origin), and -- most importantly -- gone is that weird structure near the beginning.

What was this thing supposed to be? A pyramid? A hobbit house? Crude rock-cut dwellings? It's both iconic and inexplicable, even ominous. The land is so barren that it's not clear what functionality -- if any -- is intended for these "windows." Interestingly, these holes start off crudely made in Mario Kart 64's first iteration -- and this is interesting given that it would have been easier to make rectangles in the MK64 engine -- but then become more smoothed out over time.

In fact, if we were attempting to retrace land use history, we could say that the track was constructed, then the mining operation moved in, then the Shy Guys sold the land for reclaim as a down-n-dirty recreational site to the Chargin' Chuck development group (not uncommon in real life depending on the area), destroying this structure in the process. It's a shame. Something about those windows speaks to me. I feel like they were made by ancient hands. There's a secret there, but I can't figure out what.

SPIRIT:  I Discovered Something HORRIFYING In Mario Kart 64's Creepiest Track! (47 minutes)