It's impossible to overstate just how much of a game changer having a home internet connection was at a time when most households were completely offline.
Getting there wasn't easy, either... and I'll always remember just how much of an effort my sister did in order to convince our grandpa to get us online just to pursue her teenage goals of having her own social media and places of internet gossip. It literally took her months of sweet talking, begging and convincing before the old man caved in and actually got fifteen freaking feet of phone wire to get us on the World Wide Web. Why such a gargantuan amount of wire? Because my household had stood for nearly a century at that point and phone boxes were a relatively new addition to it, so they were decidedly out of the way and needed to be linked to our computer through a really long space that was way above ground level. It was a science project getting both ends of the stupid thing to meet, and it was even more extreme because the computer was also a new thing and had been tucked in a corner, away from everything else. By the time we were finally connected to FullZero (a terribly crappy dial-up server), my grandpa had taught us quite a few new swear words through the sheer effort that took getting that stupid wire straight and hung over walls, just for it to get tangled again the literal second he let go of it. I swear, dude deserved a medal just for sticking around and finishing the project, especially after an unseasonal thunderstorm rolled around and delayed the entire thing because no-one was suicidal enough to man a ladder under those conditions.
But once everything was said and done? It was like a gateway to another world. And it gave us plenty of opportunities to chase every vague hint, every keyword, every game title and half-remembered website we had heard about during recesses throughout our childhoods and early tweenage years, feeding them all to Terra's basic and limited search engine, getting to shady sites and seedy internet hangouts with wide-eyed excitement. I'm sure we caught our very first viruses that very day, too. And, of course, there were tons of battles to be fought with our grandpa, who simply didn't understand this technology and often raged about the fact that the phone was rendered unusable while we tried to get mysterious .zip files from strange sites, taking hours to download things that we could only hope would actually work on our tired and outdated computer (and just to show how green we were, we didn't even know how to open those files initially, so we ended up spending hundreds of Pesos downloading things that had no further use to us until we figured out what WinZip was).
I kinda miss the times when main menus were actually made to represent their games.
I saw tons of interesting things during those first few months online, but nothing could really prepare me for the ultimate contradiction: one of the sites I was visiting at the time had an entire section dedicated to a single game, an "oldie" so well-regarded as to get that honor when nothing else would... Monkey Island never got that treatment, despite being arguably the king of all Abandonware games. Neither did Doom, Lemmings, Maniac Mansion or even Prince of Persia, but Broderbund's 1990 offering had just towered over all of them and effectively got it. Yes, it was "Stunts", a game I had never even heard about that was driving all those people crazy and had its own CATEGORY with THREE subforums just to try and contain people's excitement for it. It was amazing to behold, and just weird enough to entice.
Stunts was a devilishly simple game: you drove one lap against one opponent (or the clock, if you so desired) and that was it, but the thing that kept it fresh and interesting was the fact that, as the name implied, it was all about performing stunts, jumping over boats, gaining air time by getting on ramps, launching yourself from high points on the map or just dodging random obstacles designed to make your car burst into flames in the flashiest, most spectacular way possible. Its simplicity kept it crisp, and that freshness allowed it to age very well at a time when games were seen as a bit of a one-trick pony: master what's in front of you and move on. Simple as that. But there was no "what's in front of you" with this one because it allowed the player to modify it to their heart's content, so the whole thing never aged, despite the technology used to make it fading into the background as everything else moved forward. The game was literally going strong a decade after its release due to a combination of those factors, and that allowed it to transform into something entirely new.
Amazingly, this site is still online. What a time capsule of horrendous design and untamed passion! Even though I never visited it myself, it's truly here where our story begins.
In just a few months that isolated category became a red-hot with activity, with people mingling, sharing tips, and just enjoying talking about a game that they had all suddenly became addicted to. Once a race had been posted, everyone in there just jumped right into it and started submitting replays, sometimes even overwhelming both the staff running the competition and the script itself. The site hosting that went offline so often due to this that it became sort of an inside joke, with people making crude, early memes about it just to poke some harmless fun at it. It was great... and, because it was truly that great, it didn't take long for it to evolve.
The first sign of "trouble" came a few months after another Stunts competition played its final tournament and announced its disbandment, which caused all of its competitors to flock to our site to continue their game. At some point I logged onto the forum to find messages written in English (madness!), and soon enough those guys and our guys were trading messages in both broken Spanish and broken English, showing a sense of community and camaraderie that is almost lost these days, now that translation tools have become much better and that schools do their best to actually teach foreign languages to an acceptable degree, something that was simply not true in my times (I wish I spoke the kind of English my oldest one speaks now when I was his age... that would have saved me a lot of embarrassment!).
What our Stunts competition looked like.
Funny as they were, however, those international players didn't really feel like being part of the site itself, and mostly stuck to the Stunts category. It made sense, really... they couldn't speak our language to have proper conversations in any of the other sections, and they probably weren't even interested in doing so. In a sense, it was like there was a digital border between the Europeans and the Latin Americans, a border that had been blurred by the fact that they were there, but that existed nonetheless. But then, there was Luna.
Luna was an interesting case because she actually did her best to participate on the forums through some pretty good efforts of her own for mastering our language (you could just tell that it wasn't the result of early Google Translate -- there was a certain realism to everything she said, even if most of it was wrong and imperfect). She would browse the rest of the forums and chime in whenever she could, often providing fresh takes that were just readable enough to stand. And she would also spend a good chunk of her time online being a regular on the eternal and omnipresent "What Song Are You Listening To?" thread, introducing us to bands like The Mars Volta, Tristania and The Diablo Swing Orchestra, which were a breath of fresh air for those of us who kept scrolling through the pages upon pages of the same Spanish songs and Top Chart junk over and over.
Due to the way she participated on the forums, Luna started to become really damn good at speaking the language, even if reading such an informal and crude version of it caused her to pick up jargon as common speech (and yes, it was hilarious to read her underline a serious post with something meant to insult without ever realizing it), and soon she settled for something that I'd come to know as "Spanglish", but not even a full version of it... because, you see, being 15 at the time, sometimes excitement got the better of her and she'd just scramble to come up with something to say that would match her wild streak, and words would often fail her, resulting in her throwing her own stuff in there, mysterious Norwegian words that meant nothing to us (and that Google couldn't even decipher), often followed by "XD". It truly was something to behold.
What Luna's replay typically looked like.
And she was SO DAMN GOOD at the game, too.
She would joke about having nothing better to do due to the freezing temperatures that plagued her neck of the woods, dismissing her mastery of the title by saying that her top spot would be up for grabs as soon as Summer rolled around, but that was just modesty. She'd always place on the top three and hers was the score to beat. Many of us took it as a personal challenge because she did it so effortlessly as to result infuriating in a playful way. Now, I'm not sure if she did it "cleanly" because, well, Stunts let you undo any crashes and errors legitimately and within the program itself without ever showing up in the results, but that was stated as valid on the rules. And watching her replays (which were uploaded separately and made available to everyone wishing to see them for sake of transparency), you could see that she was really on top of her game, driving those blue vehicles that would immediately become her signature machines throughout the few tournaments she took part in like a damn pro.
I wasn't nearly as good as Luna and those other guys, no matter how much I punished my mechanical keyboard by sinking the arrow keys in an attempt to stay on the track during those impossible sharp turns. I partook because it was fun and something to do, even though I never broke the top ten on any of the races I "showed up" to. But it didn't matter because the game had transcended being something to be enjoyed within its executable and going online to rant about the trollish nature of some of the tracks we were to race on, or to exchange tips, was an even greater experience than crossing that finish line after sweating like pig, keeping one eye on the road and the other on the ominous timer that topped the screen, desperately looking for ways to shave just a few seconds off my time.
I truly do consider those times to be a sort of self-contained "golden era" of internet usage... but, in a way that's just too damn fitting for its own good, it all came to a screeching halt after the guy running the tournaments decided to step down, never to be seen again. His farewell post was a mess of a rant that nonetheless shared some truth about the current state of affairs, not only on our little corner of the internet, but on online culture as a whole. He talked about formerly bannable offenses being overlooked (and even condoned), about the friendly spirit of competition being gradually replaced by bitterness and chaos, and about the fact that running the tournament just wasn't as fun anymore due to those factors. When the Stunts category was closed, and then hidden entirely (burying years worth of irreplaceable memories in the process), it truly was the end of an era.
What my replay typically looked like.
The international players left en masse after being rendered "homeless" by this unexpected announcement, and even Luna bailed after just a few months of trying to find some footing somewhere else in the community. None of them responded the call to join the "spiritual successor" tournament hosted by a rival community, either... but I'm not surprised, as that was honestly made out of spite more than anything.
I never saw my friend again after that last tournament, and I honestly do get it -- we were both approaching adulthood at the time (being 17 by the time the final curtain fell) and we never got close enough to exchange off-site communication details... no MSN Messenger to speak on, no e-mails to exchange, and definitely no SMSs to send. But I'll always remember this little Scandinavian player who braved the language barrier just to pursue her passion, and my mind always wanders back to her excited posts and hilariously misguided statements as I play the game again, even some twenty years later.
I don't think the developers could ever imagine just how much fun and excitement they'd be responsible for by adding this track editor into the game. Its simplicity made it accessible, and its accessibility made it into an asset for fans to turn into something truly beautiful.
I'm gonna close this mess of an article with a little confession: many years after both the original tournament and its cheap successor had come and go, I decided to search the web for an alternative, somewhere on the net where Stunts still reigned supreme as the definitive multiplayer experience... and I actually found one (inactive as of 2015, but still online). And the first thing I did? Checking the rankings and the member list in search of my friend's old handle, locating several bygone members that I thought lost forever in the process, but failing to find her. She really had moved on.
I truly do believe that a Stunts tournament just like the one we had back then could still totally work today (and better than ever), but even if it doesn't, if it truly belongs to the past now... well, my memories are too precious, and I will always be thankful for the way this game let me approach online multiplayer at a time when my 56K modem and Windows 98 computer forbade such a thing due to the incredible limitations placed upon me due to their age and lack of power. And much like Road Rash 3, International Super Star Soccer Deluxe and Doom, this one became so much more through the memories associated with it... memories that allowed me to share a single player game, to talk to someone from the other side of the world, across hemispheres and time zones, sharing jokes built on badly-used words and hidden meanings. And when you have something of that magnitude... well, let's just say that it is impossible to taint the experience, regardless of how it ended.
What about you? Ever played Stunts in this way... or at all? Or maybe you have your own tale like the one I just told you about. If so, I'd love to hear it!
Til next time!
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