History of Free Rider HD: Part 4 the Silver Era

History of Free Rider HD

Free Rider HD is a platform create-your-own-level racing game that was released in December 2013 by Canadian studio Kano Games and Polish studio One More Level. It has since garnered over 700,000 player created tracks and over 2 billion plays. Over the years, the history of Free Rider HD has gone much untold, as it’s not a flashy game that can be streamed well, however it has a dedicated playerbase that pours numerous hours into their creations.

The story of Free Rider HD’s beginnings goes back before 2013, during the Free Rider 2 era. Free Rider 2 was very popular on game aggregate sites like AddictingGames and Kongregate. As such, players wanted websites where they could share their own tracks with the online community as opposed to code sharing, which was popular at the time. So came the websites Canvas Rider and Trackmill, which hosted modded versions of the game where players could upload their created tracks and exhibited new features. These websites would see large growth between 2009 and 2012. The creators of these websites, Maxime and Goose, respectively began to see a large amount of profit as the ad revenue started pouring in.

The problem was, neither of these guys had the rights to the game. And the small fortunes they made, all came crashing down New Years, 2013 where players and forum users were outraged to see the track editor taken down and replaced with a new and in alot of ways inferior game, Free Rider 3.



Under the noses of the Free Rider playerbase, the rights to the game were sold to Canadian studio Kano Games. And obviously this didn’t sit well when people looked to the new database and saw how atrociously bad the new version of the game they loved changed.



Objectively it was ugly as sh*t. And as someone who played on both Trackmill and Canvas Rider, it had neither the positives that made those website's versions great. Trackmill had exclusive vehicles, Canvas Rider had no lag due to the game's camera being changed. Free Rider 3 on the other hand, had no other vehicles and lagged like hell.

Obviously the outrage on both websites was a given




And everyone was pissed off to find out that all their tracks got moved over to FR3, even though they would never endorse that garbage.

No one was going to deal with that. So the majority of the forum community between Canvas Rider, Trackmill and other websites moved to the now defunct website Black Hat Rider, which was basically a clone of Canvas Rider, created by haxzerz.




The players within this community would go on to shape the early Free Rider HD community: Wheeliemaker/weem, tsunami/alexander, Ness, pssst, cky, deadrising2/Elibloodthirst, armator, YoYo124, mr..a, Easternbiker, strat, nasrani, Hashplant, among others. BHR was a quiet yet active community. There was a shift in the behavior of the community, Canvas Rider and Trackmill were both extremely toxic on the forums. BHR was able to survive solely off people enjoying the game. People really only played for fun, since there wasn't many people to show off to.

The BHR community peaked during the first Remix Contest, hosted by pssst. Which was based around remaking and changing old Canvas Rider tracks. The high feelings this contest created, was able to hold the small community together for the year. The best tracks from that era include:


A world to discover by fried_rider


ミランダ by nasrani


Undercover by Vapaa

and others.

But we still had no hope for the future as far as the community went, we were just delaying the inevitable. None of us wanted to move to the trash that Free Rider 3 was but we didn't want to give up the game either. In December, our prayers were answered.



Sort of. Free Rider HD was offputting at first. because the changes in framerate, slight differences in mechanics and new ghosting system was extremely unfriendly to someone who played the old Canvas Rider system. The only thing it had going for it really was the database didn't look like ass, and it didn't lag.

So began the early days of Free Rider HD.

 

feel free to add to this. here's the old cr forums: https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/fr2db/

 

Very well said and knowledgeable. I was never a part of the CR forums, so even though I played a bit back then, some of this is new to me, which is pretty cool

 

hope this can continue, and the admins don't get upset about the criticism of kano.

 

I should go more in depth on how bad Maxime (don’t really know gooses side) looked. He knew the impending doom was coming for months, and dropped it on everybody at the same time.

 

superb explanation. can't wait for every FRHD era to be written up.

 

Detailed and well written. I wasn’t there, but I’m glad I can catch this glimpse of this game’s history. Hope to see more parts in the future.

 

Very nice. This was very well written and informative, I'm sure this will help the documentary.

 

Part 2
~~~~~~~

And so, Free Rider HD began. And the lurker communities like Black Hat Rider and other remnants began to join in that first month. Such as, Wheeliemaker/Weem (the 17th member and 1st non-kano affiliate to register on the forums), Eli (24th), Stig (31st), pssst (36th), and the others that were mentioned previously. The website didn't have the burst in activity you would typically expect from a new game, as the Kano boss man Eric didn't want to make any public announcements yet.



Also at this time, the track editor was not available yet. You could only play the tracks that had been brought over from FR3, Canvas Rider & Trackmill.



This ended up causing a small bit on controversy on the website still in it's infancy. Since you couldn't actually upload anything at this point, it was still perceived as inferior to Black Hat Rider. This became a problem when players who were not involved with BHR and had been holding off on the game the last year were eagerly looking for somewhere to upload their tracks, most notably Maple, who had emerged from out of nowhere.



This would evolve into a problem that would be addressed several times over the next year, where people would invite people from Free Rider HD to Black Hat Rider.



However within it's limitations, the newly born community began to gain activity. During the first several months of the forum there was a monthly posts leaderboard, where users would essentially but not really spam in order to top the leaderboards. Eli, Blaze06h and pssst were the most active users at the time posting hundreds of times per month. This also resulted in the creation of several mainstay threads: Post Your WIP Screenshot Here by Coffee, IRL pictures by Hashplant, pssst thread by pssst, The Ghosting Thread by tw8 and others.

Notable members who joined during this time period as follows: Wheeliemaker/weem, monkeys, niclauzon, Corn/corn_rider, Coffee, Elibloodthirst/deadrising2, tw8/tw80000, Stig, YoYo124, pssst, nasrani, strat, Hashplant, Cesar, Blaze06h, speedy_xd, Sono, crane, Maple, Darksideofthemoon, Pityboy, Bowloffire, Tremulant/cdawgrider123, Prologomaker, etc. There was also several on-lookers from the BHR community who still saw the new website as inferior and refused to initially take part in it, notably Ness, xwinx, mr..a, Foundations, cky, armator and alexander. Other lurkers include Max007x and zwinxz.



Within this small playerbase everyone began grinding to have their tracks ready for the launch of the track editor. As mentioned above, people wanted their tracks up before or at launch. In the meantime, learning how to ghost the new system became a priority as well with the emergence of the Ghosting Thread, where people would share their times on tracks before the forum was made.



Through the month of January we started to get a taste of what the Free Rider HD editor would look like.



Reaction was mixed, however it was outright negative behind closed doors. Saying it had a clunky, ugly look. Some of us were interested in the new features the editor had.

When the editor was finally released on February 5th. The majority of the old community resented it, and continued to use offline CR editor clones or the BHR editor to work on tracks before importing them onto the Free Rider HD editor to upload. Tracks released around launch include:


Intrepid Journey by niclauzon


Country Cycling by Max007x



Oblivions by Hashplant and Foundations

and so began the Bronze era of Free Rider HD

 

fire

 

lol

 

i like how pssst talks about himself in third person

 

wow this is impressive

 

added a link to this thread on the first page of the timeline, under isenki's cr timeline.
also thanks for the editor add date, very interesting reading about the early days of frhd, might help to contribute to this when you reach the period when I joined the community haha

 

It’s necessary

 

Part 3
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

After the track editor was released many authors began to grind creating tracks and share them on the forums to separate themselves from other authors. This also included re-uploads en masse from other websites. Maple quickly made a name for his self making back to back bangers in Yellow Mountain, Snags and Witchmist.



So did many others, pretty soon people wanted a way to brag about how good they were at making tracks. A badge of honor, a title. On May 14th, players who had previously had tracks uploaded from Canvas Rider or Trackmill, or whom were deemed to be good authors were given the title "Classic Author" and given their own special forum.



The day after, the first campaign contest was announced and held exclusively on the new forum.



Here is an example of the requirements for track 1:



Track 1 of the Campaign, strats intro by strat, would go on to be the most played track of all time, currently amassing over 10 million plays.



Other things going on at the time was the development of mobile/tablet versions of the game, which was officially released on March 11th, 2014. The curve tool's release on July 29th, 2014. And the game would continue to gain popularity on the Chrome Web Store.





Notable members who joined during this initial surge in popularity as follows Minus/Eryp, Coolman2/spruce, Pancakes345, codrey/Volund, brainchef, rey827, shelbylowry, dope.penguin123/superdupervance, FREEZ, flyingoctopusinlove/foil, RiderExtreme2, jacobcahoon/cryogenic, wagon, bocajrs, Egghead, ficus, jefe, thesouthamericanguy, skeeny, gun, Charliehd, silverbird7, redorblue, kiva, tinmew, asierro, totoca12, 3r4nd0n, darkplant, swiftex. Also included are the players who came out of hiding like joelbmx/pinn, Max007x, zwinxz, and the majority of the BHR crew.

This burst in popularity was reflected in the Trending tracks section at the time. Since Featured tracks did not exist at the time, the Trending page was the only way to gain notoriety as an author. The algorithm for the page was fairly stagnant, so if you made a track and it managed to get on Trending, it would stay up there for weeks at a time. Players would spam challenges in their friends list or advertise on other peoples tracks, in order to get plays.

However, this would cause a rift in the forum vs database community. Popular database users were concerned with creating tracks that were easy & generic in order to accrue a lot of plays. Forum users switched focus over to drawing better and innovation, which can be seen in the feedback to Maple's Drawing Thread and Max007x's




However sometimes feedback from your peers isn't enough, so people began to once again hide in what was now a hate-filled circlejerk for Free Rider HD and their playerbase, BHR. And they tried to convince other players to come along, a lot of snitching and drama commenced. Some prominent members, ie alexander were banned for inviting people.



One positive from this however was the BHR-only, Box Contest hosted by FOIL, which had several great tracks released from it, such as: Wrath by Maple & far from my box by nasrani.




Despite the high quality stuff that was still coming out, there was still a huge negative effect that the Trending page had on FRHD and the short lived merit of being called a classic author. Essentially anyone who could draw an easy track with a thumbs up, +1 or please like at the end was getting enough notoriety to warrant being a classic author, some others outright asked the dev team to become one and were accepted.



The standard was too low. People wanted a higher title, or something to recognize their tracks ahead of the broken system that was the Trending page. First off, the Trending section was broken down into an additional Hot section where users could see the most played tracks intra-day, which alleviated a lot of the pressure on making tracks easy enough for the main playerbase. Second, classic author was renamed to "Official Author" because by that point, the majority of classic authors didn't represent people who made the jump from the older websites to FRHD. And third, was the holy grail, something that would have a massive effect on how much time was spent into trackmaking, the featured track section.

The Featured track section was popular on all Free Rider clone sites before it. Featured tracks are supposed to represent the cream of the crop in terms of creativity, playability, and overall quality. The dev team was looking for "Featured Track Moderators", a new title. This would have to be someone great enough to be able to judge quality of tracks based on their own merit. Several players tried to sell themselves, but on Dec 9th, 2014 when the Featured Track page was revealed so were the first set of Moderators:



Elibloodthirst, Maple, Max00x and WheelieMaker/weem held a new power. And they were tasked with finding the old tracks and ones released within the last year that deserved to be featured. In total 197 tracks were featured within that first week.

Elsewhere on the forum, pssst was grinding his own track hoping to be the first track featured post-release of the list, and also rapidly promoting his own contest, the Remix Contest 3, a continuation of the contest started on BHR a year earlier. On Dec 23rd, wooden bucket by pssst ft. ness & foundations was released and became the first new track featured.



This also served as a promotional tool for the Remix Contest 3, which would be the first contest on FRHD to receive wide participation and send us off into the next era.

 

cool one pssst

 

This is an absolutely fantastic thread

 

What is bhr?

 

bhr stands for black hat rider
pssst literally explained what it was on the first post of this thread