Stunt

Stunt is a TrackMania Nations Forever gamemode focusing on the more creative side of TrackMania - the stunts. Unlike the many other gamemodes of the game, time of the finished race does not matter in the stunts mode, instead the players' final score is determined by the amount of insane trickery they have performed on the map.

Stunt is one of the least popular gamemodes in TrackMania Nations Forever, partly due to its weird mechanics for awarding points. The actual algorithms and formulae behind the calculations are still undiscovered, as team Brain has no stunts mode players.

History
Stunt was added to the game with its very first release back in 2003. According to Hylis, who is the main mastermind behind the logic for the gamemode, he wanted to make a "crazy" (not to be confused with crazy maps) mode where players would be able to "goof around" and "do mischief".

Initially, many players enjoyed doing all sorts of amazing-ness on the stunt maps, however it got dry very soon due to lack of updates and many bugs in the stunt calculations. It is firmly believed that the amount of points awarded is directly correlated to the player's nickname. That is, in part, because of the fact Hylis once held every single world record on the official stunt campaign in the game, with players called "Hylis666" and "Mega_Hylis" being right behind him on the said leaderboard. Eventually, this would lead to the collapse of the stunt mode as it was known, as every single entry in the rankings would have "Hylis" in the nickname (most of those players were not actually Hylis, however it is speculated that at least 20 of the top 100 stunt players were his alternate accounts). One of the more prominent stunt players at the time was "__Hylis__TURBO__", who managed to amass a total of 20 world records in the campaign.

In one of the later game updates, this error was fixed and many players went on to change their handles. Nonetheless, that did not help revive the stunt mode, and while it still exists in the game it is widely unpopular with the community who still remember Hylis' deceit.