Uploaded December 2019 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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Over 3.5 years ago, Isotarge found a golden banana that was very far out of bounds very high up inside the Caves Beetle Race map. Since then, there has been no method to pick it up without emulation hacks until today.


So, the main trick of acquiring the Golden Banana is a trick where you can bring held objects into another map (sometimes, depending on loading zone properties) and they will spawn at your entrance location in the map. Normally this is limited to items you can normally hold in the game (kegs, boulders, vases etc.).
However, by destroying a held object at a certain point in the pick-up animation, you keep the held object reference despite you no longer holding the now-destroyed object. Because of this, you are now holding free memory. By manipulating memory so that a certain value lies 0x5A after that reference (the memory location which defines the type of object something is), and then walking into these loading zones, you can arbitrarily spawn anything into any map.
After a lot of brute forcing and spinning round in circles, we managed to get that value to read 0x0017 (23 in decimal format), and therefore spawn a cannon into the Beetle Race map. This launches us up to around Y=285,000. This is where N64 would crash since your height is over the value which the Nintendo 64's processor can handle in this regard. That being said, Wii U VC does not have any problems with this.
You then have only a couple minutes to get to directly over the GB and then get into first person to deload the map before the beetle finishes the race.


This is the 202nd unique golden banana to be able to be collected in the game. The only remaining one left to our knowledge is one very far out of bounds in an unused minigame map. It is unlikely we will get this as we do not have any way to get into this map as of right now.