Excitebike Cheat Codes & Secrets

Game Mode Selection

Excitebike has no traditional cheat code menu, but its mode select screen hides more content than a first boot reveals. From the title screen, press Select to cycle through the available modes before pressing Start:

Mode	Select Presses	Description
Excitebike A	0 (default)	Solo time trial — no CPU riders on course
Excitebike B	1	Time trial with CPU-controlled competitor bikes
Design A	2	Full track editor, solo test ride
Design B	3	Full track editor, test ride against CPU riders

Most players discovered only Modes A and B on their own. Design Mode (detailed below) is the game’s deepest hidden feature and was largely unknown to Western players who never read the manual.

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Design Mode (Construction Mode)

Design Mode is one of the earliest built-in level editors shipped in a commercial console game. It requires no unlock — just cycle to it via Select on the title screen.

Editor Controls:

Button	Function
D-Pad Left / Right	Move placement cursor along track
D-Pad Up / Down	Cycle through placeable objects
A	Place selected object at cursor
B	Delete object under cursor
Start	Test-ride the current layout
Select (during ride)	Return to editor

Placeable elements include ramps of varying heights, rough terrain patches, lane-change arrows (the diagonal ramps that shift you between upper and lower lanes), speed-bump sequences, and spectator obstacles at course edges. A fill indicator at the top of the screen shows remaining placement capacity — once maxed out, no additional objects can be added.

Critical caveat — RAM-only storage: The NES cartridge version holds your design in volatile RAM. Power off the console and it is gone. The 1986 Famicom Disk System release (Japan only) added disk-based save support for custom tracks — the only version where designs survive a power cycle. Players using FCEUX, Mesen, or RetroArch can use save states to approximate this behavior on the NES ROM.

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Engine Temperature Exploits

The temperature gauge is the game’s core resource, and understanding its exact behavior separates casual play from competitive runs.

Your engine heats while holding B (turbo) and cools when you release it. If the gauge fills completely, your bike stalls for a fixed recovery period — always a net time loss.

Cooling rate by situation:

Situation	Effect on Temperature
Release B on flat ground	Slow passive cooling
Release B while airborne	Minimal cooling; no heat gain during flight
Ride through rough terrain	Rapid cooling, but significant speed penalty
Crash / respawn	Full gauge reset on respawn

The respawn reset exploit: Deliberately crashing when your temperature is near-critical can reset the gauge faster than passive cooling allows. This is only useful in Selection B when you are already significantly behind the CPU pack — the time lost to the crash animation must be weighed against overheating stall time. In tightly packed CPU fields, a controlled crash on a safe flat section can preserve more race position than coasting through an overheated crawl.

Partial turbo pulsing: Instead of holding B continuously, tapping it in short bursts keeps the gauge in the middle range indefinitely, allowing sustained near-top speed without risking a stall. This is the standard technique for long straights in competitive play.

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Ramp and Landing Techniques

Landing position after jumps directly affects your exit speed. The angle of your bike at landing is controlled by Up (nose up / wheelie) and Down (nose down) on the D-pad while airborne.

Landing Type	Technique	Result
Downslope landing	Match nose angle to ramp decline	Speed preserved; slight boost
Flat landing	Arrive level	Visible speed loss, ~0.5s penalty
Nose-down flat	Hold Down while landing flat	Harsh speed loss, extended wobble
Overshoot to flat	Miss ramp entirely	Worst outcome — flat penalty plus recovery wobble

Optimal approach: Before each ramp, release B to avoid overheating, then hit B at the crest for maximum air. While airborne, use Up on the D-pad to tilt the nose back slightly. Time the landing so your rear wheel contacts the downslope of the next bump first. Chained downslope landings across a ramp sequence can be executed with nearly zero time penalty.

In Design Mode, experienced players build back-to-back ramp sequences tuned so a specific partial-turbo cadence chains perfect downslope landings through the entire layout.

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Selection B — CPU Rider Strategies

CPU riders in Selection B follow predictable patterns that can be exploited:

• Pileup avoidance: CPU riders frequently stack up behind difficult ramp sequences or in tight lane sections. Tracking where these clusters form on each course lets you plan lane position 2–3 seconds ahead to maintain clean lines.
• Lane-change forcing: Cutting across a lane-change arrow directly in front of a CPU rider forces it to react to the new lane, sometimes causing it to clip terrain or stack behind another rider.
• Drafting: Sitting directly behind a CPU rider at matching speed provides a marginal speed bonus on long straights while reducing heat generation slightly. The effect is small but measurable on Course 5’s extended flat sections.

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Qualifying System and Course Completion

Excitebike uses a qualifying time gate rather than a lives system. There are no lives and no continues — fail to finish a course inside the par time and the run ends.

Fact	Detail
Number of courses	5 (Course 1 through Course 5)
Advancement condition	Finish within the qualifying time
Failure result	Run ends; return to title screen
Lives system	None
Password system	None
Post-game content	Brief congratulations screen, then hard loop back to Course 1

The loop: Completing all five courses displays a congratulations message and restarts from Course 1 at identical difficulty. There is no escalating challenge across loops. Best times are tracked for the session only and are not saved across power cycles.

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Known Glitches

Phantom collision in Design Mode: Placing multiple objects at closely overlapping positions in the track editor can cause the game’s collision data to stack, creating an invisible bump that triggers the crash animation even when the track looks clear. This is a capacity-limit artifact — it appears when objects are packed near the editor’s maximum density. It can be exploited in Design B to create surprise obstacles for CPU riders who have no awareness of phantom terrain.

Screen-edge wrap: On specific track configurations near the scroll boundary, a bike traveling at maximum speed can briefly pass the right screen edge and trigger a position correction on the following frame. This momentarily disrupts collision detection and can sometimes allow the bike to pass through a slow-moving CPU rider without the usual deflection. Difficult to reproduce deliberately but well-documented in frame-advance analysis.

Temperature carry on interrupted crash: In rare cases where a crash animation is cut short by a simultaneous lane boundary trigger, the temperature gauge does not fully reset on respawn and carries a partial value forward. This is unreliable to reproduce and has minimal practical impact.

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Version Differences

Feature	NES Cartridge (1985, NA)	Famicom Disk System (1986, JP)
Save custom tracks	No — RAM only	Yes — disk save
Design Mode included	Yes	Yes
Preset courses	5	5
Two-player simultaneous	No	No
Track editor capacity	Standard	Standard
Save qualifying times	No	No

The FDS version’s save feature is the only functional difference relevant to cheat/exploit play. Players on the NES version who want persistent custom tracks must use emulator save states or leave the console powered on indefinitely.

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No-Password Notice

Excitebike has no password system of any kind. The game’s brevity (five courses, no lives) means there is nothing to resume between sessions on the original hardware. Any password-style code strings circulating online for this title are fabricated. The game’s manual confirms no password mechanic exists.