3pointD.com

Wow, look at all those cars. Even better, watch this 3-minute video of them. [Via Jim Rossignol.] You’ll be surprised: seeing 1,000 non-colliding cars stream around a road course in the excellent racing game Trackmania Sunrise actually gives a look at something like an organized system tending toward chaos, or at least toward entropy. Beginning as a well ordered fan of hoods, roofs and airfoils (watch for this moment at the start of the race, just after the title card reading, “1K Project II”), the cars end up in a chaotic mess by the end, stuck into a pond at all angles. It’s a beautiful mess, though, and shows how even a single-player game can become something more than the sum of its software, in the right hands.

The video was apparently made not by having 1,000 racers on the track at once but by overlaying 1,000 replays of the same track on each other. Trackmania lets you save your runs for viewing later, and also includes a replay editor that lets you combine those runs into a single movie. (I only have the free version, Trackmania Nations, so I’m not completely familiar with all the features.)

By overlaying 1,000 runs of the same track, sMull, who created the video, achieves some kind of Trackmania apotheosis. The thousand runs effectively cover every inch of the track, but not in a perfectly ordered way, of course. What’s fascinating is to watch the evolution of the “pack” from nearly perfectly ordered at the beginning to chaotically jumbled at the end. It’s almost as if Trackmania were being used for some kind of innovative visual representation of a data set. But besides being fascinating, the video is also just one of the most straight-up beautiful game images I’ve seen in quite some time.

The other 3pointD thing about Trackmania is its track editor. Even in the free game (which you should already be downloading), the track editor is elaborate and satisfying, and the fun physics of the Trackmania world (accurate but forgiving), combined with undamageable cars, make for a surprisingly engaging experience. There’s also a huge community of free Trackmania servers out there, on which people have built wildly impressive tracks — many of which are nearly impossible to get around for mere mortals like myself (i.e., those of us without USB steering wheels, or whatever people use). Plus you can download and edit other people’s tracks. It’s a community worth checking into — if only because it produced the video linked above. Here are a couple of other images from it below. Enjoy.