Nadeo's sequel to TrackMania Nations combined seven environments, a copper economy and the ManiaLink sharing system into one Windows game.
TrackMania United is a 2006 Windows racer from Nadeo, the sequel to TrackMania Nations, which gathers every earlier TrackMania environment. Its arcade driving, copper economy and ManiaLink sharing system shape the game, and it later received the United Forever expansion and Star Edition.
TrackMania United is a 2006 racing game from Nadeo that gathers every environment from the earlier TrackMania titles into one package. It keeps the arcade driving, the level editor and the sharing system of its predecessors while adding ManiaLink, ManiaZone and a copper economy. Critics welcomed it, although many saw it as a compilation.
What is TrackMania United?
Nadeo developed TrackMania United, and Focus Home Interactive published it for Windows. It is the sequel to TrackMania Nations, and it was designed to bring together the players who were spread across the series' earlier games. Its name reflects that purpose of unification.
The game is third-person, with occasional shifts to a first-person view or a wider panoramic camera. Its control system is the same simple scheme used in earlier titles: four buttons for accelerating, braking and steering, plus controls for restarting from the start or the last checkpoint. Players can use either a keyboard or a gamepad.
Medals are awarded for lap times in gold, silver and bronze. The AI drivers are the three quickest racers, and they set the bar for those medals. Mastering a track takes a great deal of trial and error, because the particular behaviour of each course has to be learned before a strong time becomes possible.
One Windows game that gathered every TrackMania environment, with coppers, ManiaLink and a sharing system built to keep players together.
Which environments does the game include?
United includes seven environments, drawn from TrackMania, TrackMania Sunrise and TrackMania Nations. Each one has its own visual style, its own vehicle with distinct handling, and a choice of time of day. The table summarises where each environment came from and how its car behaves.
| Environment | First appeared in | Vehicle and driving style |
|---|---|---|
| Desert | TrackMania | American car with good brakes, limited handling and a very soft suspension |
| Rally | TrackMania | Car similar to a Renault 5 Turbo 2, built for skid control on mixed surfaces |
| Snow | TrackMania | Pickup truck with low top speed and strong handling |
| Island | TrackMania Sunrise | Ferrari-like sports car, the most accessible environment in the series |
| Bay | TrackMania Sunrise | Very responsive 4x4 with fast, energetic, stunt-heavy driving |
| Coast | TrackMania Sunrise | Roadster that skids easily and needs careful braking |
| Stadium | TrackMania Nations | Formula 1-style single-seater that is easy to handle on narrow tracks |
The Desert was the first environment Nadeo ever created. The team chose a highly realistic visual style for it, which it considered more mature than the fantasy of the tracks, and the car was designed to lean onto two wheels in corners to reinforce the fantasy side of driving.
The Stadium environment was originally a part of TrackMania Nations and was carried into United with a redesigned look. All the circuits sit inside one big multi-purpose arena with clear skies, and surfaces range from concrete and dirt to closely cut grass.
Nadeo also tried to build two further environments, Toy and Moon, but both were scrapped. The team judged them too small and, more importantly, out of step with the rest of the game's designs.
How did ManiaZone, coppers and ManiaLink work?
The three community features were ManiaZone, copper management and ManiaLink. ManiaZone assigns each player to a regional zone according to results, so beginners start against people in their own city and progress through county, region, country and world rankings. Each category has its own ranking, and friends, coworkers and other groups can have separate rankings too.
Coppers are the in-game virtual currency. They were used at first only to unlock building blocks in the editor, but United widened their use to buy ghosts, tracks, player-made vehicles and to improve ranked times. They cannot be turned into cash, and no real money can buy them, but they can be earned through challenges, medals, regular logins and sharing creations.
In official mode, the race that counts toward rankings is chosen by the player, usually their best time. The first attempt is free, and later attempts need coppers, though the first attempt on every track stays free. The idea is borrowed from sports competitions, in which results must be achieved within a given time frame.
ManiaLink is a peer-to-peer system within the game that offers downloads of tracks, replays, soundtracks, vehicles and videos. Each player has a personal page hosted by Nadeo, and items can be sold or bought in coppers. A built-in messaging system keeps players informed about competitions and game news.
What modes and tracks does the game have?
The game includes nearly 200 pre-built solo tracks, unlocked progressively through the silver and gold medals a player earns. All modes sort tracks by difficulty into beginner, easy, normal, difficult and extreme, and each track carries a thumbnail of its environment and a rating for Race, Acrobatic, Endurance and Speed.
The three single-player modes are Race, Platform and Puzzle. Race is a classic timed run for the best time. Platform is a hybrid of racing and platform games, in which the player jumps between high platforms without falling off the track. Puzzle asks the player to finish unfinished tracks using the blocks of the level editor.
In multiplayer, United uses Time Trial, Tour, Team, Cup and Loop modes. Points decide the winner in Tour and Team, and the Cup mode leads to a final decided by the best time. Loop races a fixed time over a multi-lap circuit, with the winner passing the most marked checkpoints. Hotseat play lets people take turns on one machine.
The United Forever expansion added Stunt mode from earlier games. In an urban setting, drivers flip their cars in mid-air, and points are gained or lost depending on the tricks and on any lateness at the finish.
How were the tracks designed?
Almost all the tracks were designed by Amelie Castelnerac, who built them from scratch using the game's own level editor. She started with the simplest maps and worked up to the most complicated. Each track was tested by someone who had never played TrackMania before, so that the team could judge whether it was accessible.
Her working rules were practical. She kept file sizes reasonable so that the game could run on all configurations, and she aimed to add a jump or loop so every course had its own character. Starting tracks were deliberately wide and simple, so beginners were not sent into walls at the first corner.
Reference times were set internally at around 30 minutes per track. The team played a track several times, and when it could no longer improve the result, that became the author time. Gold, silver and bronze medal times were calculated proportionally from this reference, and the designer checked for shortcuts, correct checkpoint placement and harmonious scenery before release.
New categories were introduced to avoid repetitive races. Race, Acrobatic, Endurance and Speed were added so that players could find tracks suited to their taste, and the team deliberately kept the tracks accessible, which meant fewer highly technical courses.
How big was the team and how long did development take?
A team of twelve people developed United, and the project represented roughly 200,000 hours of work. By the end of 2007 the game contained nearly 1.4 million lines of code, and the same small group had been with TrackMania since its beginnings.
Florent Castelnerac managed the project, Olivier Toreilles supervised programming alongside Xavier Bouchoux, and Amelie Castelnerac designed the levels. Nadeo had many more programmers than artists and chose to spend most of its resources on programming, which the company considered very costly.
The team said more artists could have helped it reach a mainstream audience, but it chose not to shape the project around sales. Castelnerac argued that consoles suit entertainment but that the benchmark for online gaming remained the PC, which is one reason the franchise never reached consoles at that stage.
Anti-cheat became a major issue. United used a lite version of StarForce, which still allowed cheating, so Nadeo later developed its own anti-cheat technology and removed StarForce from the Nations expansion. The team also improved the voting system to stop people inflating statistics.
What was the release timeline?
The project was announced at the Electronic Sports World Cup on 30 June 2006 as a compilation of earlier environments, and the release was confirmed in a press presentation on 29 September 2006. Nadeo did not offer a demo, but it ran a beta for 1,000 players picked at random before launch.
The game was released in France on 17 November 2006 by Focus. The German release by Deep Silver followed on 23 February 2007, and the UK release came on 9 March 2007. The US release was planned for March but was delayed by problems with the original publisher and distribution rights, so Focus released it there on 11 June 2007.
The StarForce protection drew heavy criticism from players. After numerous complaints, Nadeo released a version without the protection on 29 June 2007, and the update installed automatically for all owners. A Friends Edition followed on 11 December 2007, including a code that let a third party download another copy.
What did United Forever and the Star Edition add?
United Forever, free for owners from 15 April 2008, brought 65 new courses and extra editor blocks. The interface, network code and security were reworked, and the scoring was rebuilt, while Stunt mode and friend groups came too. Nadeo viewed it as the end of a cycle that completed the TrackMania concept.
The Star Edition arrived on 26 November 2009. It included 140 new tracks, bringing the total to nearly 420, through a campaign called StarTrack. The campaign came from a contest on the TM-Exchange community site, and the winning track creator, PapyChampy, was hired by Nadeo afterwards.
How did critics and players respond?
Critics generally welcomed United, with an average of 80% from 27 reviews on Metacritic by the end of May 2018. Many reviewers, however, said it looked like a compilation and offered few gameplay additions beyond ManiaLink, ManiaZone and the coppers system.
Reviewers praised the variety of visuals and the way the game ran on modest computers. IGN found the frame rate exceptionally fast and consistent, and GameSpot wondered how Nadeo combined such visual quality with high execution speed. Jeuxvideo.com called the graphics beautiful and effective, while JeuxVideoPC.com found the desert-like surroundings a little empty.
Gameplay reactions were mixed. The New York Times called it a mix of racing and puzzle solving, and Gamekult said official mode put the competitive side front and centre. Canard PC argued that the game reused proven gameplay in glossy web-era packaging, and GameSpy found the menus clunky.
The lack of collisions between vehicles was a recurring complaint, although the team had said it would probably never change. One site said that no one could cheat and that every car was identical, which made it fairer.
The commercial picture was uneven. The game did not perform as well abroad as it did in France. Even so, the community was very active, with nearly 100,000 tracks created across the series by launch.
What awards did it win?
United was named the best racing game of 2007 by Shacknews and by Play magazine. PC Zone ranked it 68th in its 101 best video games list in May 2007, and PC PowerPlay placed it 46th among its top 100 PC games in July 2007. PC Gamer ranked it 91st in August 2007 and 48th in August 2008.
The 2008 Video Game Festival in Paris gave United Forever the Milthon award for best PC game. Advertisers also used the game's ghost cars in a 2010 television commercial to promote the features of a car.
What came after United?
Nadeo later developed a series of PC games called TrackMania 2, each with a distinct environment. TrackMania 2 Canyon appeared in 2011, Stadium and Valley in 2013 and Lagoon in 2017. Only Stadium reused an environment from the earlier Nations title, but the big draw of the new releases was custom game modes.
The series also moved to other platforms. TrackMania DS arrived on the Nintendo DS in 2008, TrackMania appeared on Wii in 2010, and TrackMania Turbo brought the fundamentals to consoles in 2016. Turbo introduced procedural track generation and two-player vehicle driving.
Despite Nadeo's wish to unite its players with United, the community has remained fragmented, partly because new versions were split into separately sold environments at inflated prices.