Captain Obvious Reveal: The Mystery Rider's identity is obvious once his voice sample is heard.
First Installment Wins: Not counting the Nickelodeon Kart Racers games which is considered its own series, this game is the most well-remembered among the trilogy. Nicktoons Winners Cup Racing is an unpolished mess that has been long-since forgotten, and Nicktoons Nitro, while a much better game, has its public exposure limited to children's arcades like Chuck E. Cheese due to never being released on home consoles (and only becoming playable through emulation at home at the beginning of The New '20s, over a decade after its release), and thus isn't well-remembered or well-known.
Franchise Original Sin: For being the first real Nicktoons crossover game, SpongeBobreceives a lot of focus for how new it was at the time, as much of the game's plot points are SpongeBob-related (winning a Krusty Krab-themed award with a year supply of Krabby Patties, and the main antagonist being Plankton). However, SpongeBob isn't prominently featured on the box, and in general, the focus is still on an Ensemble Cast (helped by the fact that the character select screen defaults to Tommy Pickles, the main character of Nickelodeon's Cash-Cow Franchise at the time, Rugrats, who is also prominently featured on the box) as a whole instead of SpongeBob with the other Nicktoons tagging along, as later video games would become increasingly guilty of, including the arcade version of the game (to the point where the final Nicktoons Unite! game was called "SpongeBob SquarePants Featuring Nicktoons"). Also, Plankton was likely chosen as the antagonist since he had the closest to a plausible motive to gather the Nicktoons in a race against him.
The mere fact the SpongeBob SquarePants series has three playable characters despite being the most recent Nicktoons series represented at the time of the game's release has aged like the finest wine now that the series has essentially become Nickelodeon's true cornerstone property.
Ren appears in the intro, but isn't playable. 20 years later, he would eventually become playable in the second Nickelodeon Kart Racers game. And then the same would happen with Oblina in in the third.
Scrappy Mechanic: For every second you're not using your boost, your nitro gauge will gradually drain overtime. This can make the later stages much more difficult than they need to thanks to the fact that you can't use your boost strategically (like to recover from a burnout caused by an item or crashing into a wall). It's especially punishing when combined with the fact that it takes forever for your racer to recover otherwise.
Sophomore Slump: Nobody remembers this game's sequel, Nicktoons Winners Cup Racing on the PC. It a very, very bare bones racer with bland presentation, only eight characters comprising of the main Unite! cast (the four main heroes and their villainous counterparts), zero challenge, weird track design where you follow arrows to checkpoints instead of racing in an enclosed circuit, forgettable music, and no multiplayer.
