These racing game players are 11 days into an exhausting race to climb a deadly tower
The winner gets $15,000
Buckle up. A bunch of players are competing to cross the finish line of a brutally difficult tower of racetracks in racing game Trackmania, with a prize pool of $30,000 waiting for the first three drivers to reach the top. The course is a huge, winding gauntlet made of pieces suspended in midair, and even expert players have fallen from their positions over 1000 times, their cars hurtling back to the bottom of the tower to start again. The top contenders are currently trying to crack a difficult spot to reach the 12th floor, at which point the course will reveal unknown territory. They seem a little tired, which is not surprising. They are 11 days into the event.
If you aren't familiar, Trackmania is a long-running racing game where players build and share their own maps, and speed along them doing skillful drifts, jumps, and balancing acts. For this event, 16 experienced mapmakers have banded together to create a hellish multi-floor tower that will punish tiny mistakes, usually by sending you tumbling to the bottom. If you're thinking "oh, this is like Getting Over It", you'd be right. And it is not the first time the Trackmania community has created such a monster.
A previous tower was called "Deep Dip". This year's seemingly untameable beast is therefore "Deep Dip 2". The prize pool is funded by donations. Currently the first to reach the top is due to get about $15,000, with second place nabbing $9000, and third place getting $6000.
Right now, you can see several of the expert racers streaming their efforts on Twitch. Among the frontrunners are Norwegian non-stopper Øyvind "Wirtual" Iversen and fast Frenchman Brendan "Bren_TM2" Seve. At the time of writing, they are both chasing the Czech champion Filip "eLconn21" Šprungl, with mere centimetres separating the top heights of all three players. For context, when players race, they can see the ghosts of other players, but cars can't physically interact. This is more of a time trial thing, but it doesn't stop the sense of friendly competitiveness coming through. Nor the sense of challenge.
"It's impossible," said Seve on the 10th day of streaming his efforts . "I think an average player would be happy to reach floor four maybe, floor three. I think floor two is quite hard. I'm not usually trying to pretend that what I'm doing is insane or anything, but it's hard. It's a hard map."
You can try the map yourself, but you might not get too far, warns Seve.
"I feel like most people underestimate how hard it is just to reach floor two," he said on Twitch. "Trackmania looks quite easy. It looks way easier than what it is... You watch pro players on the world cup, they do a mistake - it almost looks stupid - but it's so precise."
You can understand that. Trackmania sometimes looks like Hot Wheels - and how could toy cars flying about on funny tracks be hard? But players have to account for a lot, says Bren. There are multiple surface types, for example, like icy roads or cylindrical beams, and each one requires a different approach.
"[The] skill check is literally everywhere... Trackmania looks so easy, quite doable by anyone. That's why it's so easy for people to backseat as well. 'Oh, you just need to land here. You just need to go on the wall earlier, and press right.'"
Skillful players can often make things look like a cinch, it's true. My favourite trick is when the racers turn their cars upside down and waddle-squash their way across seemingly impossible gaps.
But there's hope for casual racers. The organisers plan to release an easy version of Deep Dip 2, with checkpoints, so that normal idiots like you and I might some day know the terrors and joys of falling 1000 metres to our doom, without the fear of losing too much progress. But that will only happen once one of these pros beats the tower, they say.
"I encourage anyone to try the map anyways, to see what you achieve," says Bren. "I think it's good to try the map anyway just to put into perspective our attempts."
I'm gunning for them. I had to enter the map to get screenshots, and I couldn't even tell which direction I was supposed to drive. It takes skill just the read the road, never mind drive on it. Anyway. We'll keep an eye on the race and let you know how it develops.