First Stunts contact - your story!

[Mislav]

Most of you know that legendary game at least 10 maybe 15 years, but as far as I know, there was no Stunts competition before 1997 (JTK, KHR & Co.) What I wanted with this topic is you to write your very first Stunts expierence (first STUNTS expierence:) Let me start:

Long long time ago, somewhere in winter 1993, I was a 12 year old kid, I lived (few years) with my family in Germany. That's the time when 4/86 PC ruled the world. I don't remember exactly, but one day, my friend (Frederik) called me to see some new "cars game". At that time I didn't have my computer, so we used to play on his computer any games he had. What I still can remember is that Main menu screen in Stunts which was something new to us. Frederik didn't have the original disc, so there were some bugs (we couldn't play with opponents - system error check!!!) So we had to make our own competition. I can still remember how exciting it was to play that game, I just waited our next meeting to play that game on Frederiks PC! And everybody who read this knows for "The track of all the tracks" - DEFAULT. That live racing competition between Frederik and me lasted for 2 or 3 years. We didn't use RH, only the lap times on highscores board counted. And it was the closest competition we could imagine... We brought each other to perfect lap times, learnd what's the ideal line etc. It was nice time.

Me and my family returned back to Croatia in 96, and my Stunts disc copy got lost somewhere in hundrets of boxes we brought home. It was '98 when I found Stunts disc again and played the default track. It was like a time trip to me. I even made a record lap time:) New games arrived, CD killed the disc and I had my own computer and forgot about stunts almost.

What happend that I'm here with you, with the best Stunts pipsqueaks of the world? Well, after so many years, I realized that there was no racing game that could top that good old Stunts. Track editor, replay cameras, cars, even RH were just to unique and to good. And sometimes, less is more (it just not necesarry that some game is good only if it has 3 CDs and works only on 512MB RAM with 70 billion colors. Stunts is simple and because of that it's still the best racing game.)

2005 I found my old Stunts disc, I decided to see on the internet if there is somebody who felt like me, who came back to Stunts, and surprise.....yes! There is the greatest world racing competition I've ever seen!!! Well, after all these years, I feel like that little boy back in '94, just exciting to make a better lap:-)

[Mislav]

What can do Competition Car but not Indy? And where's the difference between CompetitionCar 0.9 and 1.0? Thanks maniacs:)

[Akoss Poo a.k.a. Zorromeister]

An old friend of mine and me we exchanged computer games on disks in autumn 1996. We were eighth grade (last one) schoolboys in primary school that time. We had the weakest PC among those who had one at all. The others had mainly 486s or 586s, they played with games like Mortal Kombat, FIFA 96, F1 GP 2 or Duke Nukem. We played Scorched Earth, Pinball Fantasies, Test Drive 2, and old games like this. On 2nd November 1996, this friend of mine gave me an other disk. I copied Stunts to my disk at home, and tried immediately. I fell in love with the game quickly. I drove for the whole night, and I made my first tracks. The first track of mine consisted of 4 sharp curves and 4 straights (including one with the finish line), when I went to sleep, the record on it was 16.05. Weak time, eh? That friend of mine and me, we started to exchange tracks, and we were trying to beat each other's fastest times. First I wasn't succeeded, but it quickly turned out that I am the better driver. With a little bit of experience, I began to beat him all the time. I was the first and only driver who could beat him. In the next two years, I played Stunts very often. Hundreds of tracks, hundreds of times, replays. Always with the Indy. Always with BB 1.0. Always without replay handling.
Then we played Stunts many times in secondary school. In 1998, a roommate of mine showed me replay handling. A good opponent was found: Usrin. He was a bit better than my former classmate. Usrin made some tracks, and did some fast laps on them with replay handling. I wanted to beat them - that was the first time I faced racing with replay handling. It was quite a hard job to beat Usrin's times sometimes.
Then the computers in the dormitory broke down, at home, I played other games. Stunts was fading away. But then, Usrin informed me about a Stunts competition on the Net. It was in March 2000, and it was that Swedish Stunts contest. From this point, the Stunts World knows the story...

[al il professore]

my personal best souvenir is that my personal best on default was 1:16:XX

I was the first man in the world to drive a lap under the minute in default closed with ISA rules.

on default I am near the world record 00:36:40 !!! in 2003!!! three years ago!!!  please somebody doom bonzai joe record on default, someone under 30 seconds, please!

[CTG]

Look at my former pipsqueak bio...

[CTG]

An old one...

[Mislav]

Hahaha CTG, very nice biography! But what's the name of that girl?

[zaqrack]

there are some short bio's at the forgotten http://stunts.mine.nu/corkscrew team site!
It had 10 visitors in the past 7 months! now it'll boost! hurray!

[JTK]

It had 10 visitors in the past 7 months! now it'll boost! hurray!

One of them was me last weekend.  :-)

What can do Competition Car but not Indy? And where's the difference between CompetitionCar 0.9 and 1.0? Thanks maniacs:)

That's what Luke, the ccar's inventor writes:

# Changed the max rpm to the same value as in 1.1. This change alone would have made the car file identical to the one of version 1.1. Stunts 1.0 with this file was what we have called 1.0+ above.
# Lifted the power curve, especially for higher rpms.
# I increased byte CA hoping this would give the car a bit more wheel grip.

You can read it all here at Luke's old,old,old Stunts page. To find the effects of the differences between the Indies and the Competition car, take a look at the "Indy Evaluation" page at our site.

And by the way - before KHR and me started our contest, Lukas Loehrer's was the first contest on the internet (I guess he hosted the first of all, the Godfather of Stunts Competition!). To read more about this, take a look at Zak's articles about the Stunts community, to be found at his site and directly here (part 1) or here (part 2).

Now to my first contact: It was about 1990. A friend of mine had a "computer". An Amiga. Nice games he had, we really enjoyed Test Drive. One day I was at his home and he showed my the newest game from DSI - I loved it at once. It was like Test Drive but free driving! And faster! At once I tried to build a track and made him race it. *sigh* Those were the days...

Later my father had a "PC", which meant a XT calculator. My brother KHR stole Stunts from elsewhere and we were addicted immediately! He improved racing and I tried to construct tracks, noone in the world would be able to race at all (find them at our site at the tracks section, they were called Hell 1 - Hell 5). But in the end he always succeeded. Racing these tracks, what in that time took more than 15 minutes, we discovered the replay handling trick. I also loved to invent jumps, which got names by me, like "King", "Killer", "Cleaner" and so on. Reading the names you can imagine why they were called like this: I wanted to create stunts to make KHR crash his BB 1.0 Indy. But after some hours of exercising he could cope with all of them. And so racing and constructing went on, until 1998... when all of our Stunts life should change forever - Stunts and internet, what a combination!

[zaqrack]

Godfather of Stunts Competition!). To read more about this, take a look at Zak's articles about the Stunts community, to be found at his site or directly here (part 1) or here (part 2).

and

here  part 3

very, very very hot and new

[JTK]

Cool!  

[JTK]

Very well written, Zak! Oh, yes, my heart is filled with love now.  :-)

[BonzaiJoe]

Very well written Zak, and lots of nice memories, it was great to live through it all again :-)

And you mislav, also a very nice post that made me smile :-)

First contact:

It was 1994, I was 9 years old, and after school, I was at an SFO (a place where most of the kids from the younger classes hung out after school, while parents were still at work). We had a computer there, and it had some really bad games on it that I played because they were the only ones there. The one day, an older boy came with some floppy disks, and suddenly there were 10 fantastic new games to play! There were big queues to play them. One of them was called "Stunts", and I took a definite liking to that one. It became the most popular of the 10 games, and it was already at that time, that I started Stunts-competing. A few of us kids kept pushing each others limits on the tracks, and grew better and better. Default racing times came to about 1.13-1.14 (without replay handling of course).
Those were great days. Then one day, maybe a year and a half later, I am playing on my brother's computer, and I notice Stunts is there! I ask my brother, and shows me his unbelievable Default record: 1.12.00!!
(by the way I remember once talking with an older boy, who told me his record on Default was 1.08, and I was sure he was lying. Now I see maybe he wasn't :-)).

The following time, I raced a lot on my computer, built a lot of tracks, and enjoyed beating my own records. It was when I was 12 years old that I came up with the name "Bonzai Joe", which was a character from a story I had written. The story also had a character called Jacky, which was supposed to be me, but for some reason I chose "Bonzai Joe" for Stunts. (making up names was my favourite part of writing stories then, by the way :-))

Time passed, until when I was 14 or 15, I started playing Stunts again, together with one of my good friends, who had also been playing back then, in 1994. Again, we pushed each other's times, and had great battles on our self-made tracks. My friend enjoyed making tracks that could be finished in up to ten different ways, and we spent a lot of time trying to find the fastest way. His classic was called "Otto's".
One day, the idea sprung into my mind to look for Stunts on the internet. I can absolutely not explain why this idea had not appeared to me before! It was in December 2000. I was looking, because I thought I was really good at Stunts, and I wanted to find out  if it was true. I had never thought of online competition, but was just looking for some tracks and high-score files to compare with. I immediately found Lukas Loehrer's site, and downloaded a 13-minute long track from there, and started driving. (of course I never finished it...).

Then I found a page called "www.kalpen.de", and that was the bomb! I had never expected anything like this. I immediately downloaded the track, and discovered the limit of my Stunts skills. Then in the following months, I visited this site several times each day, and spent hours and hours racing. I still didn't know about replay handling. My friend also raced a few times, with the name "ManOnMoon". In April 2001 I discovered replay handling (but of course back then, that meant saving the replay before crashing, and loading it), and my results went a bit higher. Then Zakstunts came, and the rest is history.

I had never dreamed to find a community like this, to find friends here, to have a Stunts meeting, and to win and lose so many exciting races.

[CTG]

Hahaha CTG, very nice biography! But what's the name of that girl?

The one beating me in the '90s? Her name is Timi.

[Jürgen]

Hello people!

I'm new to the forum (though I registered a long time ago) and I think this topic is perfect to make my first post here.

The first computer game I've ever played with was Accolade's Grand Prix Circuit, on my father's monochrome 386 company laptop. (As you might know, that game was developed by Distinctive Software, just like Stunts.) Even years later, when the laptop was long gone and we had our own 486DX with a color CRT, I played that game sometimes. Once, I and my family were preparing to go on holiday to the mountains... just the night before we were off to go, my dad came home from work with a bunch of floppy disks... I asked "what's on them?", and he said "see for yourself!". So I copied the files from the floppies to the hard drive, and found out it's a game called Stunts. My dad told me it's the game everyone's playing at his workplace lately, it's like Accolade GP but much more modern with lots of different cars and a track editor. I was immediately sucked in... I was around 5 or 6 years old and I told my parents I refuse to go on holiday with them as I want to stay home to play Stunts. They refused, so when they were gone to bed, I turned the computer on and played Stunts all night. I spent the whole car ride asleep the next morning, but it was worth it! The holiday was good I guess, but I know when we got home, I was back to playing Stunts and shared it with my friends, too. Then years later, I started experimenting with DOSBox and the first game I thought of to try was Stunts of course. I started reading about it on the Internet and also downloaded some custom cars. I still think it's an amazing game, but looking at some of the replays, I don't think I could stand against the professional racers... sorry, pipsqueaks here