GHOST DATA
Recorded replays of a past performance — yours or another player's — rendered as a translucent 'ghost' to race, chase, or compare against in real time.
- SOLO-DEV COST MEDIUM
- TIMING REAL-TIME
- COMMON IN RACING · PLATFORMER · SPEEDRUN · COMPETITIVE
Mario Kart's Time Trial ghosts are the canonical form, F-Zero and every serious racer since ships staff ghosts and downloadable rival ghosts, Trackmania builds its entire social layer on medal ghosts, and platformers like Celeste-likes and Neon White use ghost comparison for speedrun chase. Designers use ghosts because they solve asynchronous competition: a ghost is a rival who's always available, exactly your speed (race your own best) or aspirationally better (the gold-medal ghost), turning a solo time trial into a visible, dramatic race. Ghosts are also the best teaching tool in racing — watching a faster ghost's line through one corner communicates what no tooltip can. Key decisions: what to record (position stream is cheap; full inputs enable richer playback), which ghosts to offer (personal best, friends, percentile-matched strangers — racing someone 2% faster is motivating, someone 40% faster is wallpaper), and whether ghosts are tangible enough to draft or collide with (almost always no). Pitfall: only offering world-record ghosts — the motivational band of ghost racing is narrow, and a ghost the player can't stay within sight of for ten seconds teaches nothing and demoralizes plenty.
SEEN IN
- MARIO KART 8
- TRACKMANIA
- F-ZERO 99