Asyncrhonous tournament

A competition can be said to be asynchronous when it's not running live and so, a method has to be established to make racers' participation competitive. Almost every tournament in the history of online Stunts has followed this pattern to the point that we tend to take it for granted, but realising this possibility was a great milestone that took Stunts not only to the multi-player level, but to competition in the distance.

Early implementations

In the late 1990s, when the internet became sufficiently popular and the first online competitions came to being, the organisers would set up a website, typically, pure HTML, in which they'd provide the rules and other information for whomever would like to participate. An e-mail address was also given and racers would post their replays by sending them to that address.

It's important to emphasise that this wasn't trivial at that time. Stunts is a single-player game that only brings two near multi-player experiences to the user: the possibility to race against a not-very-intelligent AI car and the ability to get a record on the highscore table. So a player who'd invite a friend might think of hot-seating to see who achieves a better record, but not much more than that. Over the distance, without an eye on participants and without the possibility of meeting at the same time, something had to be devised and the solution lay in replay files, which is another feature created for an entirely different purpose.