The home screen of the CTGP channel from the Wii Menu.
Custom Track Grand Prix Revolution, aka CTGP-R or most commonly CTGP, is an unoffical mod to Mario Kart Wii created by MrBean35000vr and his brother Chadderz. The mod adds over 200 custom tracks to Mario Kart Wii and countless other features previously unavailable with the Mario Kart Wii game disk. It is a mod of Mario Kart Wii, meaning that players must void their Wii's warranty in order to utilize the mod. One of the main features of CTGP is its ability to host live online races even after the shutdown of Nintendo WFC. This is possible through Wiimmfi, a project created to replicate many functionalities of Nintendo WFC including online play.
CTGP's logo and main creators.
Wiimmfi's logo.
Features[]
The current CTGP-R 1.03 mod primarily features a custom track distribution of 218 tracks (216 normal tracks and two secret tracks). These custom tracks include original creations to recreations of courses from other Mario Karts and other games. With the inclusion of Wiimmfi, these courses can be played in online races with other players. In online game play, countdown mode has replaced battle mode. 200cc and item rain have been recent innovations but these are only available so far in offline or private room play. CTGP-R also allows the player to save time trials records to an online database, that has been very successful in creating separate leaderboard categories for courses although some people have found ways around this. There are leaderboards for regular courses and thousands of custom tracks, which can be sorted by shortcut, glitch, no shortcut, no mushroom, certain vehicle, certain controller, and 200cc categories, as well as the usual separation by region. CTGP has very strong cheat detection code called Ignorance is Bliss, which has been successful in making online and time trial gameplay fair.
History[]
2009, Background[]
In early to mid 2009, MrBean35000vr and his brother Chadderz, teenagers at the time, were able to crack the security of the Wii and access the source code for the console along with Mario Kart Wii. After learning about the mechanics of how the tracks and gameplay functioned, they were able to start creating their own. On August 21st, 2009, MrBean35000vr and Chadderz released their recreation of SNES Rainbow Road for online download which was essentially the first custom track created. They proceeded to also make remakes of GBA Rainbow Road and GBA Cheep-Cheep Island, but the first original custom track made was the infamous Mushroom Peaks which was released on December 22nd, 2009. On December 31st, MrBean35000vr uploaded a video showing the first instance of this course or any custom track being playing in an online room. This video became popular on YouTube, with many people gaining interest in modding in Mario Kart Wii.
2010-14, Growth[]
Many people started noticing the custom tracks and modding scene for Mario Kart Wii and began playing custom tracks, making their own custom tracks, and eventually making their own custom track distributions. On March 20th, 2010, Riivolution 1.0 was released, which allowed users to place content on their SD cards or USB devices which would patch other content to be used during gameplay. This eventually led to MrBean35000vr and Chadderz releasing the first public custom track distribution on October 12th, 2010, which was known as CTGP 2.8 and contained 28 custom tracks. This distribution was also released as a Riivolution pack. On March 1st, 2011, CTGP 4.4 was released featuring 44 custom tracks, and this release was also the first version to use custom course slots.
On October 2nd, 2011, CTGP Revolution v1.0 was publicly released by MrBean35000vr and Chadderz which was a major step for custom tracks availability. The custom menu to lead tracks was introduced, ghosts were stopped from being saved to prevent data from being overwritten which was made by the user mdmwii, and online play's time limit was given an expansion. This release included 104 custom tracks but battle courses crashed the game and were ruled not functional. On December 27th of the same year, CTGP v1.00 was upgraded to v1.01 to include 128 custom tracks. In this version, users could now play custom tracks online in worldwide races (also known as CTWW) which was developed by a user named XeR. Several months later, CTGP Revolution v1.02 was released on September 30th, 2012 which raised the track count to 184. Random selection, speedometer, Wi-Fi timer, and draggable blue shell features were added and several bugs were fixed.
2014-today, Current Version[]
After much success and popularity brought by CTGP Revolution and other mods, CTGP Revolution v1.03 was released on January 12th, 2014 with 216 normal custom tracks and two secret tracks which is essentially the maximum capacity for the game to handle. CTGP is a Homebrew application in this version, and has the option to be created as its own Wii menu channel. Over the years since its release, many features and fixes have been implemented and many tracks have separate categories as well as leaderboards for numerous custom tracks, and several improvements and modifications for online and general play. Currently, MrBean35000vr and Chadderz are working on a 24-player mod which may be introduced into CTGP in the near future.