Trackmania Sunrise Mechanics

Trackmania: Sunrise is a hybrid racing/puzzle game, developed by Nadeo and published by the Digital Jesters. It’s blend of racing game and puzzle action make it one of the most unique driving based games on the market.

There are three main game modes to play in TM: Sunrise. They are Race, Platform and Puzzle. Race sees you competing against three other cars, bronze, silver and gold. Simply beat a car to gain that rating on the track, so beating the silver car will give you a silver rating. In platform mode the aim is to get to the end of the course in as few attempts as possible. The courses consist of several jumps and loops to navigate, making this a challenging mode. In puzzle mode you have to assemble a course using pieces of track given to you, to enable you to get from point A to B, often via checkpoints.

The mechanic of racing against someone/something is obviously key to Trackmania and dates back a long way in the history of videogames. Most early driving games simply involved driving round accumulating points though in 1976 Sprint 2 from Kee Games offered gamers the chance to directly race against other people (The 2 in the title referred to the number of players) and was very successful because of this. The game itself was a clone of Atari’s Gran Trak series, albeit with a second player present.

All of the opponents in Trackmania are “ghosts”, meaning that you cannot physically touch them. In turn this means that the race mode is essentially a rally. The idea of racing against time as opposed to people on the screen is a fairly new feature; even games like 1995’s Sega Rally featured real opponents to race against. It took the Colin McRae Rally series on the PlayStation to finally fully implement this way of racing into a game. However ghost cars were around for a long time beforehand, appearing usually in time trial modes, encouraging the player to keep racing to beat their best. The F Zero series, created by Nintendo, was amongst the first game to feature ghosts; you could unlock staff ghost time to race against for doing particularly well.

What makes Trackmania so distinct are the tracks. They feature a combination of insane loops and jumps, meaning the player has to be considerably skilled to get through in one attempt. There is a blatant disregard of the laws of physics here and the style is not of a conventional Formula 1 racing game. The mechanism of riding over such obstacles can be dated back to 1989 and Hard Drivin’, from Atari. Although Hard Drivin attempted to be a realistic driving experience, it featured a memorable loop section, something new in a racing game. Jumps in racing games came from around the same time, with a game known as Super Off Road, from the Leland Corporation. Incidentally this game was a clone of Super Sprint, the sequel to the aforementioned Sprint 2. In Super Off Road the players would view the action from a top down view, being able to see the entire track at once, and would compete on increasingly hard competitions.

I believe that Trackmania successfully blends these mechanics together to create a solid game that is extremely fun to play but sufficiently challenging to keep players interested. The game also comes with a comprehensive track editor, should you get bored of the existing tracks.