Nadeo's free arcade racer turned one stadium, one car and a ranking system into a competitive game that reached millions of players.
Nadeo's TrackMania Nations, released free in January 2006, was an arcade racer built for the Electronic Sports World Cup. Its single stadium, single car and lack of collisions made it an unusual competitive game, and a later expansion and remake followed.
TrackMania Nations is a free 2006 racing game from Nadeo, built as the official game of the Electronic Sports World Cup. It offers arcade-style driving on one stadium setting with one car and no collisions. Its expansion and a later remake kept the concept alive for years.
What is TrackMania Nations?
TrackMania Nations is a third-person arcade racer. Nadeo made it, and Focus Home Interactive published it on PC in France. It was released as a free download on 27 January 2006, and it was designed specifically for the international competition the Electronic Sports World Cup. Players could train for the event at no cost.
The game was a sequel to Sunrise and borrowed its concept. It arrived with a simpler arcade design than rival racing games, which at the time leaned toward simulation and precision. Each player raced alone on the track, so cars could not touch or push an opponent.
Every part of the design pointed toward competition. The game offered online rankings, a control scheme that worked from a keyboard, and a single car that every player drove in the same way.
A free, collision-free racer built for competition, with one stadium and one car at its heart.
Why was the game free?
Nadeo released TrackMania Nations for free so that every player could practise for the world competition. To cover costs, the company placed brand advertising inside the game, including billboards along the tracks. StarForce copy protection was also added to stop cheating on scores.
Free access also avoided splitting the community between players who could pay and players who could not. Nadeo said that building the benchmark online racing game was valuable in itself, even though the game brought no direct financial gain.
Advertising space was sold to brands, and partners handled placement inside the game. In the summer of 2008 Florent Castelnerac said the business remained profitable, largely because the company was small.
How did the driving and tracks work?
Players race timed laps on circuits with checkpoints, and each track offers bronze, silver and gold medals for finishing within set times. The only car drives like a Formula 1 single-seater, and cars pass through one another, so no opponent can be touched. Leaving the track usually ends a run.
Controls are simple. Four buttons handle braking, accelerating and steering, while two extra buttons restart the run from the start or from the last checkpoint. During a jump, braking or accelerating changes the trajectory. There is also a horn.
Tracks combine loops, half-pipes, banked curves, acceleration blocks, platforms and numerous jumps. Some sections also throw up obstacles, such as holes or pillars, right in the path. The cars can also drive on walls.
Around 100 pre-built tracks are sorted into beginner, advanced and expert levels. Players can take on the single races in any order, and campaigns group several races together. The level editor lets players build their own circuits and choose the game modes and music for them.
The single car sits low and tends to roll over on corners, yet it reaches very high speeds. Each nation has its own colour scheme, and fifty-three skins match national flags. The skin is applied automatically based on the player's country of origin, although players can still customise their car.
What scoring and multiplayer modes did the game offer?
Multiplayer was the heart of the game, and players were ranked by score on global, national and regional ladders. Online modes included Time Trial for up to eight players, Lap mode with a single start, and Team mode in which two teams compete against each other.
Points depend on race results and how many rivals took part. The rankings update automatically at the end of each race, so a player can see where they stand straight away. The interface also shows news about ESWC qualifiers in each player's home country.
Hotseat mode let up to eight players take turns on one PC after each creates a profile. Turn-based play gave each player a limited number of attempts, shown by a bar that gradually empties. A friends list and challenges by email were also included.
How did Nations Forever change the game?
Nations Forever, released as a free download on 16 April 2008, added sixty-five new races, upgraded graphics and a choice of time of day. Development ran for more than a year after the schedule slipped, with twelve intermediate versions tested by around 600 beta testers.
The expansion let owners of TrackMania United Forever play with Nations players in the Stadium universe, so both games could be played together online. Single-player circuits unlocked gradually through medals, and they were sorted into beginner, easy, normal, difficult and extreme levels.
Some races now take place partly on dirt, and the time of day changes lighting and atmosphere. The boxed edition included 3D glasses for anaglyphic stereoscopic display. A Steam release followed on the same day, and that version did not include StarForce protection.
Who developed the game and how long did it take?
Nadeo built TrackMania Nations in close collaboration with the World Cup organisers, who contributed their competition expertise. Work started in 2005 and took six months, with a team of only a dozen people, the same scale as the earlier games in the series.
The link began with Matthieu Dallon, who had founded the Electronic Sports World Cup. Florent Castelnerac met him at the event held at Futuroscope, where close to 400 players competed across games including Counter-Strike and Quake 4. The event was Castelnerac's first real contact with esports.
Castelnerac also visited the Chinajoy trade show in China in 2005 and watched Need for Speed competitions. He concluded that TrackMania would suit esports far better, because the game was already built around scoring and rankings. He had also competed in sports as a young man.
The ESWC asked Nadeo around September 2004 for a game made specifically for its competition. Nadeo was not ready at that point. A year later, Nadeo proposed a tailored version of the game for ESWC 2006.
Nadeo kept a single-player mode so that players of every level, including those who never play online, had something to enjoy. The engine was technically close to TrackMania Sunrise, but the track design was entirely new, and it was tuned so that keyboard players could go as far as possible.
Why was the Stadium setting chosen?
Nadeo chose a single multi-purpose stadium because it saw the venue as a neutral cultural setting for competition. The arena is styled after Formula 1 circuits, with sponsor branding for companies like Nvidia and ESWC, and grass joins the classic asphalt as a track surface.
The setting dropped the sunny worlds, landscapes and underground settings of earlier games in favour of a more classic racing look. The original release had only one daytime setting, while earlier installments offered several. The expansion later allowed players to pick the time of day.
Nadeo said the Stadium universe reflected the team's level design knowledge in 2008, and it described the environment as a little less wild than the others.
How was the game received?
Specialist press reviews were generally positive, and the game quickly reached several million downloads. PC Open said the game fulfilled its competitive purpose very well, while Eurogamer found it more technical than its predecessor, even if it was less fast-paced.
Digit magazine found the game pretty hard even on medium difficulty and praised the graphics as magnificent. JeuxVideoPC.com called it super fun but regretted the absence of collisions. Hardcore Gamer felt that the lack of collisions pushed players to fight the track rather than their rivals.
Digit reported that players had dubbed the game the Crashday Killer, a joke about how little time they had for other racers. Edge praised it as a free title with excellent finishing touches, and Eurogamer said Nadeo could be forgiven for adding advertising to a free product.
Player numbers grew quickly. Focus and Nadeo recorded 200,000 French-speaking users in the first weekend after release, along with peak connections of 8,000 on 29 March 2006. By 25 February 2006 there were 400,000 registered players, and about 600,000 were listed in the rankings by the end of March.
Later figures were higher still. Focus and Nadeo recorded 6 million downloads in total, and around 10,000 people were connected at any given time. Nadeo announced 30 million installations and 4 million accounts in early April 2008, and about 12 million registered users were recorded at the end of 2012.
What was the legacy in esports?
TrackMania Nations was an official game at the 2006 Electronic Sports World Cup and appeared in ESWC events until 2012. Nations Forever joined the competition later, and the series took over the ESWC with TrackMania 2 Canyon that same year.
Because the maps and races changed from one competition to the next, players had to adapt constantly. That set the game apart from titles that reused the same maps for years, such as Counter-Strike. The game was also played at LAN parties, and it featured at the World Cyber Games and ESL events.
The prize money tells part of the story. The table lists the cash prizes and winners for each ESWC year that included a Nations game.
| ESWC year | Prize detail | Winner |
|---|---|---|
| 2006 | $40,000 cash prize for the Nations competition | French player Carl |
| 2007 | $20,000 total across all games | Dutch player Xenogear, $10,000 |
| 2008 | Winner received $12,000 | Swedish player FrostBeule |
| 2010 | $213,500 total across all games | Norwegian player Bergie, $8,000 |
| 2011 | $200,000 total across all games | Croatian player hakkiJunior, $8,000 |
| 2012 | Gold medal awarded | Dutch player Spam |
The 2009 edition was cancelled after Games-Services, the French company organising the event, faced financial difficulties and was liquidated. The event returned in 2010 at Disneyland Paris. Nations also held two Guinness records: 132 players connected online in one game, and 34 nationalities in an offline racing competition.
On the last day of the 2012 competition, the ESWC Kids event, a children's world cup of video games, also took place on Nations Forever.
Was there a later remake?
Yes. Ubisoft announced a remake named TrackMania on 28 February 2020, and it was released for Microsoft Windows on 1 July 2020. The remake brings official seasonal campaigns, daily selections of community tracks, new surfaces and special blocks, plus competitive modes for daily play and international leagues.
