The first TrackMania game was released in 2003. The series takes inspiration from earlier track-building games, including the 1984 game Excitebike, the 1985 game Racing Destruction Set, and the 1990 game Stunts. The single-player mode awards medals for beating set times, and players may respawn after crossing a checkpoint if they land upside down, leave the track, or want to improve their run.
On 27 January 2006, Nadeo released TrackMania Nations, also known as TrackMania Nations ESWC, partly as a promotion for the Electronic Sports World Cup. The free stand-alone game introduced the "Stadium" environment and included advertisement panels displaying sponsor content streamed from the internet. The game contained 100 single-player tracks and was primarily pitched as an online game. Within weeks of its launch, it gained almost 1 million registered online players, largely due to its freeware availability.
TrackMania DS was published in 2008 in Europe and 2009 in the United States for the Nintendo DS. It contained fewer features than its PC counterpart, including no online mode.
TrackMania Wii was announced on 30 June 2009. The game featured all environments from TrackMania United apart from "Bay," which was excluded due to the complexity of its scenery. Its North American release under the title TrackMania: Build to Race, initially scheduled for 20 July 2010, was delayed until 24 March 2011. The European release dropped the subtitle and was released on 23 September 2010.
TrackMania2: Canyon introduced a new Canyon environment and two modes — Race and Platform — with Platform mode available via a free extension pack. The game also introduced a split-screen mode and a scripting language called ManiaScript, allowing players to add their own features.
TrackMania2: Stadium was announced on 2 November 2012 and opened to an open beta on 27 February 2013, bringing back the classic Stadium environment from TrackMania Nations with improved graphics and new editor blocks. It was released on 20 June 2013.
TrackMania2: Valley was announced on 2 November 2012 and became available on ManiaPlanet on 4 July 2013.
TrackMania2: Lagoon was announced on 9 May 2017 and launched on 23 May 2017. It ported content from TrackMania Turbo (2016) and prompted a large update to ManiaPlanet called "ManiaPlanet 4."
TrackMania Turbo was announced at Ubisoft's E3 2015 conference as a spin-off inspired by 1990s arcade racers. It was released in North America on 22 March 2016 for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and on 24 March 2016 for Microsoft Windows.
A remake of TrackMania Nations was announced for Microsoft Windows on 29 February 2020, originally due on 5 May 2020 but delayed until 1 July 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was later released on consoles and cloud platforms on 15 May 2023. The base game is free-to-play, with a paid subscription model offering a more advanced in-game track editor, online events, and car customisation.
Due to the success of the series, Guinness World Records awarded TrackMania six world records in the Guinness World Records: Gamer's Edition 2008, including "Biggest Online Race," "Most Popular Online Racing Sim," and "Largest Content Base of Any Racing Game."
The PC games in the series used a copy protection system called StarForce, which silently installed a driver with TrackMania Original, TrackMania Sunrise, and the original TrackMania Nations. On 29 June 2007, Valve announced that the Steam version of TrackMania United would no longer include StarForce. TrackMania United Forever and TrackMania Nations Forever do not include StarForce and attempt to remove it if applied as upgrades to earlier versions that include it.
The success of the TrackMania series led Nadeo to plan two new games: a role-playing game called Questmania and a first-person shooter called Shootmania, both announced in 2009. Shootmania was officially announced on 19 February 2012 and released on Maniaplanet on 10 April 2013. Questmania has not been released.
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