Trackmania Predecessors - Part 2

Ok, so we’ve looked at the most direct predecessor to Trackmania: Sunrise in part one, now its time to take a look at some other games that were crucial to the development of this game. We will do this by looking in more detail at the games mentioned in the “Trackmania Sunrise Mechanics” blog entry in more detail.

With Sprint 2 being the first car game actually offering racing (you raced against another human player) it seems sensible to start by taking a look at it. The game was released into arcades in 1976 and was made by Kee Games. Kee Games was a wholly owned subsidiary of Atari and the majority of their output was clones of Atari games. Despite the fact that Sprint 2 was a clone of the Atari series Gran Trak, the game did feature something special enough to ensure it was a franchise that ran well into the 80’s. That special something was that Sprint 2 was the first ever racing game which included a microprocessor. What this meant in practice was that the game had cars for the player to race against, better graphics and more tracks.

These groundbreaking features meant that Sprint 2 was a hit and the series was so successful that when Kee Games were merged back into Atari, the franchise survived and flourished even. The success of this game and the features it introduced, such as the ability to race against other people, are why I believe Sprint 2 is a crucial predecessor to not only Trackmania: Sunrise but to every car racing game since.

The fact that all of the opponents in TM: Sunrise are “ghost cars” is a pretty distinct feature, usually the ability to ram other players is seen as a good feature (see the destruction derby series) yet races here are against the clock essentially. The ghost cars are merely there to give you a marker as to how well you are doing. Therefore the races are like a rally. It took a fairly long time for games to feature a proper rally in the sense of having one car on the track at any one time. Even titles like Sega Rally and V Rally opted to go down the route of being pure racing games.

The Colin McRae Rally series, from Codemasters, was the first series of games to base themselves around this style of play. It is therefore generally acknowledged as the pioneer of realistic rally racing games with its damage-modelling and enduring courses. However, one of the first games to feature “ghost” cars was F-Zero, on the SNES. F-Zero is a futuristic racing game series from Nintendo. By performing well on the time trial modes you could unlock staff “ghosts” to try and beat.

These games were all fundamental to a game such as Trackmania existing and being as popular as the series has been. The features they introduced were, I believe, formed into an excellent game which manages to be successfully distinct enough from other racing games to allow it to find its own niche groups of fans, as opposing to being “just another racing game.”