Joe's
Joe's is one of the tracks that come bundled with original copies of Stunts. Its name refers to Smokin' Joe Stallin, the third racing AI opponent. Like is the case of other original tracks, no feature in particular can be truly associated with the AI racer in question.
Track description
When raced OWOOT or otherwise, not deviating significantly from the main path, Joe's is the shortest of the original tracks and, together with Default, one of the two that offers a driving time appropriate for the average tournament. It includes two paths of similar length, of 81 and 85 tiles respectively and is speed-friendly. It has been built on terrain 5, which is, among the default Stunts terrains, the most feature-rich.
One of the paths contains a two-level jump, which is something most commonly seen in community tracks, proving that the original creators of the game were aware that this was allowed by the engine and probably also that it can be set up in the other direction, which makes it impossible to complete a track without going off-road. This suggests the original tracks were all designed when the engine was already finished and no more work was done on it, at least in its core. Otherwise, this would've been programmed to be detected at track-check time.
Varieties
Joe's is the only original track of which two apparently official versions are known. These are usually referred to as "Joe's A" and "Joe's B".
On 5 October 2024, while reviewing permanent competition replays in Race for Kicks, Cas saw there was only one posted for Joe's and drove a replay with the intention of uploading it, but when he tried, he got an error saying it was the incorrect track. Since there was already one uploaded to the site, he retrieved the track from that replay and compared it to his own. It was then that he realised they were fundamentally different. He commented his findings in the Telegram group and soon after, in this forum thread. He then called the track he was familiar with seeing on the site "Joe's A" and the other one, "Joe's B", the "B" also coinciding with the fact that this version has a jump with a barn in it, so it makes it easier to remember which is which by thinking "B" stands for "barn".
The quick investigation that followed concluded that Joe's "B" is definitely an original track, whereas Joe's "A" most likely is too, but the "B" version appears to be older. Here's a list of facts about the two versions that are known:
- The official copy of Brøderbund Stunts 1.0 includes Joe's "B"
- The copy of 4D Sports Driving from 1990 referenced in this wiki includes Joe's "A"
- The copy of 4D Sports Driving from 1991 referenced in this wiki includes Joe's "B"
- ZakStunts has offered both versions in different periods in its official yearly distributions of Stunts
- Race for Kicks has offered version "A" in the Permanent Competition since it was started; however, the Stunts distribution provided by it includes version "B" as of October 2024
- The earliest timestamp we have found for a copy of Joe's "A" is 1990-12-12 whereas that for Joe's "B" is 1991-03-13; nevertheless, "B" is the only one found in v1.0
