The early days of competition. (1996 - 1997)

[Daniel3D]

After reading Duplode's post about the coconut car is followed some of his links en got lost in the archives.

I was reading a random page (petrol Pete's) and read about how the early 'permanent' competition is supposed to work.
At least in his opinion.
It's a nice window in the early days that i miss in the Wiki.
Here is the site of Petrol Pete..

This is what he says:

Competitions and Challenges
Here's the list so far: (copy the source below as an example for your upload)
Peter Fortman / Petrol Pete - paf4@po.cwru.edu
01-31-96 - PAF-TRKS.ZIP Just try and beat these!
10-21-96 - ORIGINAL.ZIP
Andre Doff - adoff@ibm.net
10-06-96 - TB.ZIP (B)eat this ;-) !
10-06-96 - Valhalla
Auke Damstra - adamstra@pi.net
07-01-96 VALHALLA
Markus Nagelholz / Mark Nailwood - nagel@dbai.tuwien.ac.at
02-14-97 - PAF-TRKS.ZIP Incredible highscores for baka/barrier/bars/default1 !
02-14-97 - TB.ZIP Fascinating highscores for all 'all*'-tracks !
02-14-97 - VALHALLA.RPL A replay from the King of Valhalla !
Above is a list of people who are interested in "competing" against another person. This can be done by comparing the high score list and the replay. You will be able to submit your .hig and .rpl files via e-mail into the incoming directory and other people can download them from compete/ and try to beat their scores. What I suggest is zipping up the .hig and the .rpl file and a some sort of text message indicating who you are, your e-mail address, the date, and any sort of taunting message you like.
You can access the directory listing of this section, which probably includes files more recently added in the compete directory.

I highly recommend zipping them up with a PKzip compatible compression utility together into one file. I am going to suggest a naming scheme. Let's say that John J. Doe submitted JJTRACKS.ZIP which included tracks and high score files. Later, John Q. Public downloads those tracks, and beats all the high scores and saves replays of his triumphs. He wants to submit them to this archive, so others can be amazed as his prowess and technique. So he names the file as such.

jjtracks.961231jqp.zip
jjtracks is the set of tracks this refers to,
96-12-31 is the upload date
and J.Q.P. are his initials.
He submits it as an e-mail attachment and in the e-mail message writes:
John Q. Public / JP - <a href="mailto:jqp@isp.com">jqp4@isp.com</a><br>
<a href="compete/jjtracks.961231jqp.zip">12-31-96 - JJTRACKS.ZIP</a> I beat your score on EVERY track, JJ! Ha!<br>
JJ. Doe sees this soon after John Q. Public sends his e-mail since the maintainer of the Stunts archive only needs to save the attachment in the right directory and cut and paste the above into the web page. (hint hint)
So JJ doesn't sleep for three nights and furiously tries to outdo John's high scores until he finally beats one! It was his first track, JJDOE001.TRK. After watching the replay of his flawless run, he saves the replay and zips up the high score file and the replay as a file called
jjdoe001.970104jjd.zip

He submits it as an e-mail attachment and in the e-mail message writes:
John J. Doe / Doe-Boy - <a href="mailto:johndoe@whoami.com">johndoe@whoami.com</a><br>
<a href="compete/jjdoe001.970104jjd.zip">01-04-97 - JJDOE001.ZIP</a> (from JJTRACKS.ZIP) Those were just test runs... try and beat this!<br>
So then John Q. Public, beats the high score in jjdoe001.970104jjd.zip that very day and sends a file with a line in the message body of the e-mail like:
<a href="compete/jjdoe001.970104jqp.zip">01-04-97 - JJDOE001.ZIP</a> (from JJTRACKS.ZIP) Ha.  That was pathetic! I beat that on my lunch break. <br>
And so on and so forth... get the idea?
When these files are downloaded, most programs which can't handle more than 8.3 will take the last extension and use the first eight letters of the file. This means you should be careful when you download more than one file with the same first eight letters if you don't have Win'95. But, in most cases, you'll want to download only the most recent anyway, so this shouldn't be a problem. When you have uploaded a "challenge" I will look for the informational text inside the zip file. What would really help me is if you included a line in the message body like those above.

You can access the directory listing of this section, which probably includes files more recently addd in the compete directory.

[Daniel3D]

The thing that got me in this story is that it is very close to my start is stunts.
Of course I didn't have internet and i was oblivious to the possibility, but.
My copy came with tracks and high scores of the previous owners.
And I tried to beat them.
At the time i thought they were set by the makers of the game. That's kinda how naive I was. But anyway. This is a logical start and i think there should be a Story about it in the Wiki.

[alanrotoi]

I love archaelogical articles! Also personal stories of the different pipsqueaks. Always is needed a review of the origins. All of that stuff built directly and indirectly what the community is today.

[Duplode]

Good stuff. From what I've seen so far, Petrol Pete's page was perhaps the first "big" Stunts website, compiling information from a wide range of sources.