Happy birthday TMX

MrA in my interview says:

3. How was TMX born?
Lets imagine we are in March 2004 (or about that time). By now, I was playing online, still as "Mr Anderson", I had started making maps, and I wanted people to play them, so I would host my own server using the in game server launcher. There weren't massive dedicated servers back then, so 8 to 10 players was considered a busy server. I was getting good feedback for my maps, people liked to play them, and at some point someone was telling me I must upload them to TMX. Eventually I got around to checking it out and I found a site that looked a bit like :
http://web.archive.org/web/20040420093821/http://www.tm-exchange.com/

Well as you can see from that, it looks very old - and the news item is signed off by "MrD" & "JayPee" (You can also see three of the newest tracks are by Mr.Anderson", so by the time of that snapshot, I had found TMX, but I may not have been part of the crew.)

MrD created TMX (coded) while JayPee did all the web design, art & styling. I have talked to MrD about this previously, he and JayPee 'met' online and were talking about how they needed access to more tracks, so between them they decided to make a site for it. The first version was really quite simple, it let you upload tracks and it listed the newest ones, but they had no idea when it opened if anyone would upload a track. Well, we know now they did

At various times, MrD would be posting news items about how progress was going, and he would ask for ideas or feedback, so I emailed him some of my ideas, and he replied, and gradually I became involved. Rax (who was a moderator on the site) asked me if I would join the team, and I declined, I was concerned I wouldn't have the time, and I really just didn't want the responsibilities... I got asked again and at some point I agreed to join the crew. I ended up talking to MrD a lot on MSN (almost every day) about the design and what updates we were doing.

(So that's how I got involved, I just stumbled into Trackmania, and then stumbled into TMX).

Yeah yeah congrats and everything. Don't forget this site has also pissed many people off to never return.

Happy birthday to TMX and his developers!

Happy Birthday TMX

I've spent way to much time with you, but I regret nothing

Congrats tmx!
Been around for what feels like forever here.
Kinda crazy to think that I've built tracks for nigh on a decade.

zarexz says:
Don't forget this site has also pissed many people off to never return.

No doubt true. No one is perfect. We all do this because we love the game and love the community. It's still a voluntary project by members of the community. We don't always do things at the speed which some users would like.

I'm still blown away that the site has survived for 10 years... and that the game itself has survived for so long, through many iterations. I think a lot of credit has to be given to MrD, JayPee, MrA, Ricardo Rix, Forzyy, Piercy, TGYoshi, and the list could go on and on. A lot of admins and coders that have spent many long hours developing the sites into what they are now, and keeping them running. Hundreds of people have donated to the site too, to financially support it. And their contribution is not to be forgotten either.

Without a doubt, the reason that some of us, are maniac with this game

eyebo»LT says:
We don't always do things at the speed which some users would like.

Yes yes mister über positive, it's neither the site itself nor the difficulties this site has/had but the large amount of allknowing loudmouth rude people (sometimes even admins) writing here.

My story is a lot different than most people^^ I first discovered TrackMania through TM Sunrise, and I fell in love with creating tracks Back then, multiplayer was unavailable to me, so I just spent my time creating PF tracks. However, the computer I played it on got a bad virus, so we had to get rid of it. 5-6 years later, I remembered that I had once played Sunrise, and so I did a quick Google search. I found out that TM2 Canyon was going to come out in just a few months. I was one of the few people who accidentally skipped over every "Stadium" version of trackmania, which is probably why I hate stadium so much xD

Epic achievement in this modern era when everything is disposable and the average game has a life span of about 2 months. And MrA deserves an enormous amount of praise for dedicating a decade of his life to this project !