Golden Balloon 1.7.0

Online multiplayer is still a beta; Adventure Party and custom characters are
new — see below.

The launcher has been rebuilt around a home screen with the game's artwork, and
everything lives under Play, Content and Settings.

Adventure is no longer a one-player game. Two to four people on the same couch
can now pick their own racers, explore the worlds together and race through the
campaign as one party. High-resolution texture packs load straight from the zip.
There is also a Character Workshop for bringing your own racers into the game,
an option to skip the launcher and go straight back to the game you played last,
and a round of online improvements:
the room now shows you what your connection looks like before a race starts,
rides out a short network wobble instead of ending the race, and says so
straight away when the other player leaves.

Recommended settings: WebGPU, Restored, frame limit Original,
Motion smoothing Interpolated on 120 Hz displays or Off elsewhere,
gameplay tick rate Original, camera Authored. Unchanged from 1.6.0.

WebGPU with Restored presentation remains the qualified native and browser
visual path. Interpolated draws presentation-only in-between images from
adjacent game ticks; your inputs and the simulation always run at the
authored rate.

Adventure Party

Turn on Adventure Party in Settings — it is off by default — then two,
three or four controllers pick their racers at the ordinary character select
and take the ordinary route into Adventure. After that it is the game's own
menus, doors, balloons, Taj and cutscenes the whole way.

Everybody drives their own racer around every hub in split screen. Nobody
sits out, and nobody hands the lead back and forth.
Golden balloons, hidden keys and doors belong to the party. Whoever reaches
one first counts for all of you, and the whole group moves through together.
One player pausing pauses everyone. Pull a controller out mid-game and the
game pauses and asks for it back rather than carrying on without you.
Silver coin races are shared: any of you can pick a coin up, it disappears on
every screen, and the eight you need are counted across the party.
Taj transforms the whole party at once — car, hovercraft or plane, everyone
together, in one go.
An ordinary balloon race runs a field of six: your two to four players plus
enough computer racers to make a real race of it.
Trophy races use the full eight-racer field. Everyone contends for position,
and the championship follows player one's finish, the way the original
ceremony has one winner.
Player one holds the save file and makes the shared calls — which file to
load, dialogue choices, and quitting.
Adventure Two plays the same way, with its mirrored tracks and its own coins.

What Adventure Party does not do yet:

Boss races and the four-racer challenges — Taj's, battles, eggs and bananas —
are played by player one alone. The rest of the party waits, and the same
party comes straight back afterwards, in the same places.
Who is playing is fixed the moment you pick a save file. Nobody joins or
leaves partway; go back to the title to change the line-up.
It is for people in the same room. Adventure Party never goes online.
One shared campaign on player one's file, not a save each.
Save states are unavailable while a party is in progress.
It is new, and it has not been played end to end on every platform or through
every corner of the campaign. If a hub, a door or a course misbehaves with a
full party, please tell us on the GitHub issues page.

Character Workshop

Bring your own racers in. The launcher has a Character Workshop: point it at
a model — a .glb file, or a .dae or .zip it converts for you — give it a
name, a portrait and a licence, look over how it stands and how it sits in the
car, hovercraft and plane, then install it. Installed characters show up at
character select and can be handed to any of players one to four.
The modding guide
walks through it.

Nothing changes until you say so. The Workshop reads a package, shows you what
it contains and how it differs from what you already have, and only then
offers to install it.
A character carries how it looks, not how it drives. You pick one of the ten
original racers as its stand-in, and the custom racer handles exactly like
that racer does.
Portraits, the HUD, results and the minimap all pick your character up.
Names in other alphabets keep their own shaping.
Characters carry near, middle and far versions of themselves, so a full
four-player screen has less to draw.
Course records, Adventure saves and Time Trial ghosts stay ordinary game
data. Ghosts recorded by an added character are kept apart from the original
racers' records, as they were in 1.6.0.

Honest limits:

Custom characters are experimental. This is an early slice, not a settled
feature. Expect rough edges, and expect details to change.
They need the WebGPU backend. On OpenGL the original racer is drawn in
their place.
Online, the other player sees the built-in racer yours borrows from, not your
character. The select screen says so on the seat.
The Workshop cannot tell you whether you have the right to use somebody's
model. It asks you to confirm that you do, for your own machine, and it never
ships anyone else's work with the game.

The launcher

The home screen shows the presentation, frame rate and content packs you are
about to play with, and one button to start.

Play holds the game and every way to play it, online included. Content
holds the packs and characters you add yourself. Settings holds the rest,
with About & support underneath. To pick your game file, drag it anywhere in the
window or paste a path.

Skip the launcher

Skip the launcher (issue #60) is off by default. With it on, the app opens
the game you played last instead of the launcher. Holding Shift, or both
shoulder buttons on a controller, while it opens shows you the launcher anyway,
and the setting lives in the in-game settings under Advanced — so turning it
back off never needs the launcher. The game file is checked before it opens,
exactly as pressing Play checks it: a file that has moved or changed lands you
in the launcher with the reason.

Content packs

High-resolution texture packs work as they come. Put the zip or the folder
in your mods folder, or press Install pack… in Content and pick it, then
press Play. Nothing to unpack, convert or rename. Content lists the pack and how
many textures it supplies.

We ship no packs and host none. If you want one, the DKR-R HDR Texture Pack
is a community project led by sr.gu that redraws the original artwork in HD,
shared through the DKR-R Discord and
linked from the DKR-R project. Any pack
in the same Rice/GLideN64 format works.

No pack covers every texture, so some of the original artwork stays.

Content packs can also replace Taj's, Wizpig's and Terry's portraits. Those
three racers have no portrait in the original game, so the port draws its own; a
pack can put your picture in its place.
The modding guide
has the filenames and the steps.

Online multiplayer (beta)

Online Room ships in native desktop packages. The published browser build
remains local-only.

You can see the connection before the race starts. Once both of you are
in the room, the game measures the round trip between you and shows what it
found — ~45 ms · steady — beside the room. Pressing Start never waits for
it; while it is still working the chip says so. A slow route is reported, not
refused, and the race gives itself a little more room to absorb it.
A burst of lost packets no longer ends the race. Inputs that go missing
are asked for again on a channel of their own and filled back in, instead of
the race stopping when the gap gets too old to recover.
When someone leaves, you find out at once. The room now tells the other
player the moment your opponent's connection closes, rather than leaving them
racing an opponent who is not there for twenty-odd seconds. A brief hold
first means a hiccup in the pairing service that recovers on its own is not
mistaken for somebody quitting.
A wobble reads as a wobble. The race says Connection hiccup — retrying
while the link is late, and only says Connection lost when it really is,
instead of jumping straight from "fine" to "gone".
Each channel between you now carries its own key.
Both players need the same version of the game. A different version is
declined when joining, so update together before you race.

What online does not do yet:

Both players must be on the same platform.
A race is two players, not more.
You can't join a race after it starts.
If the host leaves, the race ends.
Some networks can't connect two players directly. There is no relay
yet, so those pairs can't race online for now.
The service that pairs you can see that you're both connected.

Online is early access and a work in progress. Please tell us what you hit —
good or bad — on the GitHub issues page.

Fixes

Taj's portrait is a blue elephant. The original procedural results/HUD
card now has a blue face and trunk instead of the tan placeholder. Existing
portrait packs continue to work without renaming their files.
You can switch the bonus racers off. Taj, Terry and Wizpig are on by
default, as before. Turn Bonus racers off for the roster the original game
shipped with, and they stop appearing on the character select. Anyone you have
already unlocked is remembered and comes straight back if you turn it on
again. Takes effect after restarting the game.
Opponent skill is a dropdown. Choose Original, Hard or Brutal without
typing a configuration value. Each choice explains its effect; changes take
effect after restarting the game. Original retains the original speeds.
Native release packages now include the Online Room beta they describe.
The release builder could previously leave that entry out even when an
online-enabled qualification build had it present.
A racer wearing a custom appearance no longer drops back to its original
character in an Adventure Party hub, at any Model Detail setting.
Custom characters now use the same colour handling and the same highlight
response as the rest of the picture, so one no longer looks washed out or
lit from the wrong place next to the original racers.
The Character Workshop's arrows and ticks draw as arrows and ticks instead of
empty boxes.
A four-player Adventure Party hub draws far more than the one-player screen
the game set aside room for, which could corrupt the picture or take the game
down. The game now sets aside room for the party it is actually showing, and
a picture that runs past its buffer stops there instead of drawing whatever
came next in memory.
A damaged or hand-edited custom character file is turned away instead of
taking the game down with it.
A character name too long for its label is now cut between letters, so an
accented or non-Latin name can never end in half a letter.
The sky in split-screen races no longer has black bars down each side on
widescreen displays. The two-player backdrop was drawn at the original 4:3
width, so the edges of the screen were left unpainted — most obvious on
Fossil Canyon and the other tracks with a black horizon.

Known issue

Keep the camera out of walls remains an optional, experimental camera
mode. Near some continuous walls it can briefly release and reapply its
correction, and a three-player spectator view has shown a single side switch.
Authored, the default camera, is unaffected. The broader motion-quality
check also fails in 1.6.0 on brief correction re-engagements, so this known
class is not new to 1.7.0; it remains open rather than being counted as fixed.

Compatibility

Save data, settings, unlocked Magic Codes, and Time Trial ghosts from 1.6.x
carry over unchanged. Two settings rows are new — Adventure Party and
Skip the launcher, both off by default; Content packs was already
there. The launcher is keyboard and gamepad operable, but does not claim a
VoiceOver, UI Automation, or other screen-reader semantic tree.

Golden Balloon 1.6.0

Released 2026-09-01. Online multiplayer is a beta — see below.

Golden Balloon can now play online. Race a friend head-to-head over the
internet — private races with a six-digit code, single races or full
tournaments, across regions. This release also fixes T-posing characters,
wobbly best-time numbers, and several widescreen-HUD glitches.

Online multiplayer (beta)

Create a private race and share the six-digit code — or the QR code — and
your friend joins with it. Pick your racer, pick a track from the full track
list, and play a single race or a tournament. When you connect, both screens
show the same three groups of words; read them aloud to each other, and if
they match, you know you are linked to the right person.

North American and European copies of the game race each other. Online
races run at the same speed for everyone; offline play still runs at your
region's original speed.
Online races are for two players in this beta.
Tested so far on macOS only. We race on macOS ourselves. Windows and
Linux have online too, but nobody has played it there yet — if you do, you
are the first, and we want to hear how it went.
Both players need the same platform for now. Mixed pairs, like Mac to
Windows, are declined when joining; cross-platform play comes in a later
update.
Both players need the same version of the game. A different version is
declined when joining, so update together before you race.
Online play runs over Golden Balloon's free hosted service.

What online does not do yet:

Both players must be on the same platform.
A race is two players, not more.
You can't join a race after it starts.
If the host leaves, the race ends.
Some networks can't connect two players directly. There is no relay
yet, so those pairs can't race online for now.
The service that pairs you can see that you're both connected.

Online is early access and a work in progress. Please tell us what you hit —
good or bad — on the GitHub issues page. Your reports decide what gets
improved next.

Fixes

Characters no longer briefly appear unanimated ("T-posing") at the start of
a race, at any Model Detail setting (issue #48).
The best time and best lap numbers in track previews no longer rock
back and forth during the preview flyby (issue #59).
With the widescreen HUD on, the banana counter no longer overlaps a
portrait in the banana challenge, and minimap markers line up with the map
at the correct size (issue #57). With it off, nothing changes.
Added characters can now save Time Trial ghosts, kept separate from the
original racers' records (issue #54).

Compatibility

Save data, settings, unlocked Magic Codes, and Time Trial ghosts from earlier
1.5.x releases carry over unchanged. The launcher is keyboard and gamepad
operable, but does not claim a VoiceOver, UI Automation, or other
screen-reader semantic tree.

Golden Balloon 1.5.2

Released 2026-08-25.

A bug-fix release closing the reports that came in after 1.5.1: the
Widescreen HUD lays out correctly across the reported screens, a stray
rectangle in the menus is gone, Time Trial times and ghosts save reliably on
Linux, a Hot Top Volcano out-of-bounds exit no longer hangs, and Nintendo
Switch Online N64 controllers map correctly. There are no new features and no
changes to gameplay.

Fixes

The Widescreen HUD — the "Expanded HUD" from the reports — now lays out
correctly: Time Trial lap times no longer pile up on the right, the TAJ
MAGIC label is centered, the battle-mode HUD sits where the game intended,
and the race-start slide begins off screen instead of parking at the right
edge (issue #51). It is still off by default, and the normal HUD is
unchanged.
Switching Game Paks in Save Options, scrolling the name-entry letters, and
the end credits no longer flash a thin stretched bar across the screen. The
game occasionally asks for a rectangle drawn with its corners swapped; real
N64 hardware draws nothing for those, and now the port matches — which
clears the same artifact everywhere it appeared (issues #52 and #56).
On the PAL (European) version, the menu text no longer creeps upward after
you return to the launcher and start the game again.
The brief blue flash in the Walrus Cove cave is not a bug — it is faithful
to the original game, which draws its own out-of-bounds curtain in exactly
that blue. It looks identical with every enhancement turned off (issue #53).
Time Trial times and ghosts now save reliably on Linux (and other
non-macOS native builds). Saves resolve to your per-user profile
directory; if you were relying on a folder-local save/ it is kept in
place, and you can force folder-local saves with a portable.txt beside
the game. The game also now tells you, instead of failing silently, if it
ever cannot write your progress (issue #54).
Leaving Hot Top Volcano through the out-of-bounds trophy-storage route no
longer hangs on a black screen; it now returns to the hub exactly as the
original game does, so the trick still works (issue #55).
Nintendo Switch Online N64 controllers now map correctly over Bluetooth —
the C-buttons no longer open the overlay or double as Z. You can also now
change which button opens the in-game overlay in Settings ▸ Controls
(issue #55).

Compatibility

Save data, settings, unlocked Magic Codes, and Time Trial ghosts from
1.5.0 and 1.5.1 carry over unchanged. The launcher is keyboard and gamepad
operable, but does not claim a VoiceOver, UI Automation, or other
screen-reader semantic tree.

Known reports under investigation

One Windows report of characters briefly appearing unanimated ("T-posing")
at race start (issue #48) still could not be reproduced from source, and
the game applies each racer's seated animation before the first frame is
drawn. If you saw this, please retest on this release and report either
way in the issue.

akratch/goldenballoon v1.7.0 Golden Balloon 1.7.0 on GitHub

Golden Balloon 1.7.0

Adventure Party

Character Workshop

The launcher

Skip the launcher

Content packs

Online multiplayer (beta)

Fixes

Known issue

Compatibility

Golden Balloon 1.6.0

Online multiplayer (beta)

Fixes

Compatibility

Golden Balloon 1.5.2

Fixes

Compatibility

Known reports under investigation

akratch/goldenballoon v1.7.0
Golden Balloon 1.7.0

on GitHub