Hello, Planet!
My introduction to the Trackmania (and broader) world.
I remember chilling outside of a shopping mall in Kaunas and waiting for the bus that would take us to Gdansk, Poland, for the Open’er Festival there (wait, they have Linkin Park in the lineup this year, banger). That was also the same evening when everyone was expecting the next Hello Planet post to drop on the ManiaPlanet blog. Somehow, this situation has been ingrained so deeply inside my brain that it keeps reminding me of itself whenever any Trackmania debate shifts towards communication.
So I feel like this is an appropriate title to also start my endeavor here. It’s something that I have long been missing from the developers of Trackmania, Ubisoft Nadeo. Those posts were probably one of the very last ones, where you could get a glimpse into what was in store for the franchise, what their thought process was in making one decision or another. Even though they weren’t at all frequent or regular, you knew that when one was about to drop, it would contain something fresh inside.
To me, it was the general pulse of the game, something to look forward to. In the grand scheme of things, you could probably compare it to Path of Exile’s Developer Manifesto or Factorio’s Friday Facts. It was innovative, it was technical, it was honest and it was straight to the point. All of the qualities that I’m honestly missing in today’s news posts. But I guess it’s still something and not just a void to scream into.
Now here I am, a mere Trackmania consultant, as I would like to call myself these days, trying something different. Trying to spread my thoughts outside of the usual Twitch stream and Discord channel, where I spend most of my time interacting with the Trackmania community. I’ll try to uphold this original Hello Planet vibe in my writings and simply spill my thoughts, learnings, technical tutorials and other impressions. I might suck at writing, there may be spelling errors and other mistakes, but at least I will finally have something, that’s no longer lost in the depts of chat logs, that can be found and referenced properly in other talks, without the need to take screenshots and save those until they’re needed at some point. Yes, this is a dig at Nadeo.
So, who am I, why am I here and why does nearly every Trackmania Twitch channel have this 7TV emote added to it?
KEEEEEEEM
There have been countless alternative nicknames given to me throughout… almost 16 years (?!) of my presence in Trackmania. I’ve slowly grown from being a regular noob grinding gold medals on some tracks downloaded from the Trackmania Exchange (PlayPal was a banger feature), to where I am now, working with big companies and brands like Dreamhack, Twitch, Red Bull and Comic Con Baltics.
It all probably started with the local Lithuanian backwards driving competitions, where I went from being a player (already active in the local community) to becoming an organizer, because the original guy wasn’t able to do it anymore. Besides that, I organized another racing and, if I remember correctly, video clip competitions for the Lithuanian community. This was roughly around 2010-2013, still on Trackmania Nations Forever.
That was the basis for me to eventually go bigger. Coincidentally, around the same time, ESL Trackmania published a call-for-admins, so with some local encouragement, I applied and successfully joined the team. I would say my stay at the ESL Trackmania team has been the catalyst that defined my global presence within the community. Up until the section closing in 2018, I’ve led various initiatives ranging from creating the Competition Title Pack to establishing the central Trackmania hub on Discord.
Competitions at ESL were also what mainly introduced me to the streaming “scene”. I wouldn’t even call it a real scene, it was merely frostBeule and Spam being the two most prominent streamers broadcasting ESL matches and their practice on a somewhat regular basis.
Becoming a moderator on Spam’s stream was probably the last major turning point in my “career”. It has enabled me to spread my moderation web basically across the entire section on Twitch. I was there for riolu’s first (and last 🙃) streams, I was there when Wirtual had been streaming mainly to his buddies in the middle of the night and organizing Bread cups (the winner would get a loaf of bread delivered, or an equivalent value paid out via PayPal, seriously). I was also there for the times when Massa or even Carl Jr. would boot up their streams for the occasional competition practice. It was a true wild west when you think about it.
Eventually all of that has meant, that I had the privilege of ending up somehow involved with official Trackmania esports (Grand League, World Tour), fun projects like Twitch Rivals and nowadays even the offline grassroots events like XPEvo or my labor of love - the Trackmania event at Comic Con Baltics & Baltics Gaming Expo. Whether it’s organizing, operating, fixing, sharing my opinion or anything else, usually I somehow still get to chip in. Normally, I don’t like to publicly brag about that, but it still warms my heart when it gets noticed (even if it’s in a meme format):
Enough of self-glazing for now. Hopefully, the idea is clear, that over one and a half decades I have accumulated enough knowledge, experience and simply memories to have some sort of credibility to accompany my future posts.
My exit strategy
Time flies and I’m not getting any younger. Whilst being called the “load-bearing Lithuanian” in the community sounds fun, it also sounds a bit worrisome. Suddenly one day things goes south, shit hits the fan and all you have left is to hit the “KEEEEEEEM” button and hope that I’m there to fix things, because the official Competition tool or something else has gone rogue on you. Sounds crazy, but it’s been happening way too frequently for my comfort :D
Is this sustainable? Right now, sure, I’m still chronically online enough to be a part of the awesome Trackmania community. But real life, with the lovely responsibilities it brings is also a thing. For the time being there two portions of my life can coexist, but, honestly speaking, having a good night’s rest would also be a pretty damn good thing to have. That’s the status quo so far.
New responsibilities will come over time, priorities will shift and eventually, for me, Trackmania will have to be scoped down to become a simple piece of background entertainment like any other YouTube video, that you watch between cooking dinner and moving on with the rest of your chores. So, before I get to say “life happened, goodbye”, why not have a little bit of fun and ramble with the public about anything Trackmania?
Armed with a brand new Substack account and a blank canvas, I’m here to dump everything that I know, everything that I have seen and everything that I think is exceptionally good or problematic today. And for the case when (not if) something breaks again, hopefully I will have a post to cover it. Knowledge sharing is king and writing a book for this is silly, so I hope a little outlet here for my thoughts will be a good compromise before I fade to the background.
What’s next
I will not promise anything revolutionary. I will not force myself into a corner by setting a writing schedule that I cannot follow. I will not monetize knowledge (though I might explore putting some opinion pieces under a paywall, 🤷). I will not pretend to be the savior of Trackmania.
What I will do is post whatever crosses my mind at a certain point in time and whatever I think is cool to share with the public. There are a few topics that I have in the backlog already, such as:
A de-brief of Comic Con Baltics 2025
What is it like to produce a Trackmania event?
The state of Trackmania esports 2025H1;
Competition tool 101 (that probably deserves its own series);
How should a competitive map look?
…and a bunch of other random opinion pieces that might be inspired by discussions wherever, whenever. What do you want to hear from me?
I’m still setting all of this up and I have no idea myself, what to expect. Maybe I’ll end up talking to no one, maybe it’ll bring some value. Normally, I like to plan things out (such is the life of an event organizer), but I reckon not having a concrete plan for this will let me enjoy it without turning it into another project to maintain against my will. Let’s see where this ends up going.
Update: It took me 5 minutes to set up Grammarly and fix some glaring mistakes already. I suppose this is also a good opportunity to improve my English writing 👍