The time the coffee shop meeting in Heat was a game of Mario Kart

LA at night. The spots of light give the landscape an air of science fiction.

Cars speed along a freeway. Robert DeNiro’s Neil McCauley checks his mirror, notices a car behind him and pulls up.

That car is driven by Al Pacino’s obsessive cop Vincent Hanna. It stops behind McCauley’s car.

Hanna walks toward McCauley. McCauley opens his window.

“You like Mario Kart?” Asks Hanna.

“Sure,” replies McCauley with a shrug.

“I know a place.”

So begins an iconic scene in which two driven men play out their rivalry on the tracks of Donut Plains and Bowser Castle.

“It was the two acting giants of modern cinema, together on screen at last,” said director Michael Mann in a 1998 Wogan interview.

“It needed to be strong. It needed to encapsulate the rivalry, but allow the respect to show through.

“What better way to do this than through the medium of Mario Kart?”

The ‘place’ was a run-down apartment that Hanna kept. It contained a drinks cabinet, a battered sofa and a Super Nintendo Entertainment System.

“So the original script had the two of them walk in, Hanna poured them both a whiskey. McCauley looks around in silence, the tension electric,” continued Mann.

“After about thirty seconds McCauley speaks – ‘I call Bowser’ – and the two men sit down and play this epic game of Mario Kart.”

It was only after filming began that the problems began to appear.

“We were a minute or two into the scene. McCauley had just hit Hanna with a green koopa shell as the script dictated, but then Al threw down his controller and stood up.

Pacino continues the tale in his autobiography.

‘Hoo-hah! That scene. It was a great idea. The energy was in the room. You could feel it, everything was working. There was just one problem.

‘I should have been Bowser. I always play better with Bowser, and besides, my character Vincent, he’d have been Bowser. It was his place, it was his Nintendo, he’d have been Bowser.”

“As soon as Al stood up, I knew the scene was lost,” sighed Mann.

“They were both great about it. Real pros. They just wanted to make the best movie they could. But the both thought they should have been Bowser.”

Ultimately, the scene transferred to a coffee shop and is considered legendary.

“Pure luck,” laughs Mann.

“We took a break to get some coffee. Al and Bobby decided to work on the lines while our tech guy tried to figure out a way they could both be Bowser.

“As luck would have it, the cameraman had left he camera switched on and we picked up the two of them running the lines and when we looked back at it, it was clear that the dialogue worked even better without the game being played.

“So we stuck with that version.”

The unfinished Mario Kart scene has never been officially released, and Mann has no plans to do so.

However, due to a manufacturing error, some of the early copies of the rental videotapes contain the Mario Kart scene instead of the coffee shop scene.

Occasionally, one comes up at auction, most recently in 2009 fetching over $22,000,000.

So if you want to see Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino play Mario Kart, you’d better start saving.