I discovered Trackmania when PowerUp came out. I was a student at that time, I did not even know what I really wanted to do, but I already loved video games and programming. It was a friend form boarding school who bought it, one of the few who had a laptop (very popular guys in boarding shool as you can guess ^_^). I remember that we had to launch the game multiple times because of SecuRom
: the CD drive on his laptop was not handled correctly or something, and it took 5/6 attempts to work. But when we got it to work, it was great
I've never been been a good driver, but I was good at the Puzzle mode : I built the most efficient tracks, and my friend drove. I don't remember how the ladder worked at the time : I think we had to upload the replays on a website or something. And if I remember correctly, my friend and I got some pretty good records (for a very brief time) on a big puzzle map (a metal pyramid) because of our clever pathing.
A few years later, I had not played TM in a while (I'm not a good driver xD). While I was in engineering school, a friend of mine wanted to organize a TM competition for the students, but she did not have the time to do that on her own. So I helped her do it. I was completely unaware that this competition would be used by people at Nadeo to look for internship candidates
. As you can guess : I got the internship and joined Nadeo (along Gouxim, we were the young ones at the time xD)Proof of how bad a driver I am : when we were testing some team racing modes (before Canyon IIRC), in the studio people gave my name to "a run that went well, until the car crashed on a pillar of the finish line, ruining everything" : they called it a "guglish" (a gugli finish) ! xD
Happy 15th year Trackmania
... and thanks to the NADEO friends for your brilliant tales!
