4D Stunts League
4D Stunts League (also known as 4dsL) was a Stunts competition held by Alan Rotoi. Aimed at Latin American racers, it found extraordinary success through its two seasons, held in 2003 and 2004.
History (by Alan Rotoi)
4dsL was created in May 2003 as an info site about Stunts in Spanish. Later on, I published a competition track for August 2003; but I had to delay its beginning because I received many registration emails and replays. So the competition started 15th of July 2003 with the Melee track, which lasted until 31th July 2003. After that, the tracks were monthly.
I received a lot of racers because 4dsL was associated with another abandonware comunity: La Cueva de los Clásicos. Its admin, Lucas, helped with advertising in his page, giving 4dsL 200 visits per day. Melee, the first track, was able only for 15 days but had 57 pipsqueaks plus the "motivating" time from the virtual opponent Skid Vicious. The idea was to create a newbie competition with easy and fast tracks to make a bridge to the main competitions in the stunts community.
I decided to make a dual league competition to not discourage the newbies with impossible times from the "pro" racers. In one side we had the main competition, "Iberoamerica" (i.e. Latin America plus Spain and Portugal); in the other, the rest of the world. In those times Latin America didn't have pipsqueaks that could unbalance the scoreboard and immediately demotivate the rookies. That was the key of the 4dsL success.
The names used for the tracks in the first season were taken from Monkey Island saga islands: Melee, Booty, Scabb, Phatt, Dinky and Monkey. These tracks, when placed together, form a large map. The competition site also featured a tricks section called "Trucos", which was essential to learn new and different ways to race.
The first season had six tracks, and ended on 31th of December 2003. The winner was the Colombian Tsino who took the 1st place in five tracks, only being beaten by Gutix in the last track. Second plays went to XSCrapy and Gutix was overall.
The numbers were huge: 130 racers from 17 different countries. We also had a very active chatroom (in Spanish) in an IRC server and a subforum within the abandonware forum of La Cueva de los Clásicos.
After a six month break, the second season started on 1st of July 2004, featuring a new site design, and ended on 31th December of 2004. Most of the data of this season was lost because the server hosting it was hacked. Anyway, the Brazilian Dark Chaser won the season, and Gutix helped with the final count.
The names for the tracks in this season were taken from Tolkien's Middle Earth, such as Rivendel, Moria, Isengard, Gondor and Mordor.
Attempting to harness the potential of new jewels who entered the competition, I took some pipsqueaks for my own MeganiuM Aces High team to take part in ZakStunts. They were Chulk, Gutix, Ayrton and AbuRaf70. Thanks to good publicity, many racers were eventually led to the main competitions of the community; and so the project reached its main objective.
