The Trackmania series has stood for uncomplicated arcade driving fun for years. The 2020 remake of Trackmania Nations annoyed us recently with a strange pricing policy, but that doesn’t prevent fans of the racing game series from simply continuing to play the original from 2008.
And even 13 years later, there are still big surprises in the small community of this slightly aged game: With a really impressive maneuver, a player has taken a shortcut that has been considered an impossible mystery by players for years.
The story of a legendary abbreviation
Part one: fight for the best time
Everyone should have noticed what a speedrunner is by now: This special type of player tries to play through certain levels or complete games in record times.
In doing so, they are constantly developing new techniques to bypass game mechanics or to find shortcuts. This means, for example, that the first level of Doom is completed in eight seconds or the complete Early Access version of Baldur’s Gate 3 is completed in seven minutes.
There are also speed runners like this in Trackmania Nations, where a handful of players have been fighting for the best time on the D07-Race route for what feels like forever.
That’s how it all started: Already on the release day of Trackmania Nations, April 16, 2008, players discovered a first shortcut. Instead of driving over a so-called engine-off block, which paralyzes the engine of their vehicle until the next checkpoint, players simply drove directly to the memory point off the track.
A year later, this technology was optimized by flying through a targeted crash into the checkpoint after driving through the hilly area around the track and then backing up your car directly at the push of a button.
Instead of driving on the left across the route, after driving through the dirt, it goes straight to the checkpoint.
This technique was almost perfected by the French player Epik, his world record from October 2010 withstood all competition for over three years.
Part Two: The Struggle of the Germans
In December 2013 another duel broke out for the world record on D07-Race, between the two Germans Riolu and Racehans. Without the use of new techniques, they managed to undercut Epik’s world record by four hundredths of a second. However, after a hard-fought month, they seemed to have reached the limit of what was possible.
Riolu lost out to Racehans and had to come up with something new. His idea: simply skip the second engine-off block, which is waiting at the end of the route, with enough speed.
Riolu experimented with this idea for several weeks, but repeatedly failed by a few millimeters. With a strong lap, he managed to jump the block and so undercut the Racehans world record by almost a second.
This record held again for over three years, until Racehans returned in March 2017 and was able to undercut Riolus’ time by four thousandths of a second.
After numerous attempts, Riolu managed to literally skip the engine-off block.
Part Three: The Impossible Shortcut
Just a few days after Racehans’ record, on April 1, 2017, another player named Trevon published an edited version of the D07-Race map. This built in acceleration fields before the last jump over the engine-off block and should show that another abbreviation could be hidden here.
That’s the idea: If you land sideways in Trackmania Nations and drift at the same time, the car makes a very sharp turn – a so-called »bug slide«. If you manage to lift the nose of the car and touch the edge of the track with the underside, you can catapult yourself into the air with a targeted ricochet.
In theory, you are flying straight to your destination.
With a “bugslide” it is possible to catapult yourself to the goal by crashing with the gang.
This method was quickly adopted by the community dismissed as an April Fool’s joke, since it seemed absolutely impossible to carry out this even approximately on the unchanged route.
In 2019 Trackmania fans are holding a joint event aimed at breaking all existing world records in Trackmania Nations. Riolu managed to beat Racehans’ best time with the known technique.
At the same time, parts of the fan base actually began to try their hand at the impossible shortcut. The players Drakar and Hefest each tried their hand at the bug-slide jump for over 250 hours, but even after thousands of attempts they did not succeed in reaching the finish line.
Hefest was combative in the Discord chat.
After more than a year of non-stop trying, a third player joined the Austrian Rollin: He mastered the technique of the engine-off skip in a very short time and began to try the impossible jump – until he actually made it just a few days later:
In one fell swoop he undercut the old world record of Riolu by three seconds with this exceptional performance, which is still unique today.
Is that the end of the story now? Probably not. The bugslide ricochet was perfect in the end, but the rest of the times could be improved a lot. In the sections of the route before the big jump, Rollin was a good 1.5 seconds behind the old world record – so there is potential for an even better time.
Dimi and Michi talk to two Twitch streamers about how the dedicated speed running community is organized, what different types of speed runs there are, and how to become a speed runner at all.