How Trackmania's best players defeated Deep Dip 2, the hardest track ever

Trackmania is a series founded on simplicity and a sense of community, a stripped-down racer with simple controls where you try to edge out your friend's best time. But while Trackmania is pick-up-and-play fun, the game's competitive scene is anything but casual. Contenders grind the same tracks for hours in order to shave off tenths (or even hundredths) of a second for a coveted podium spot.

A recent community event was even more harsh. Deep Dip 2 is a custom-made map that took one of the game's top players more than a month to defeat. When 2023 world champion (and Deep Dip 1 winner) Brendan "Bren" Seve finally took the crown 36 days into the challenge—as well as the first prize of $16,178—it represented not only a triumph for Bren, but a major win for Trackmania.

We spoke to Bren and some of the devious mappers behind Deep Dip 2 to get a sense of what exactly made this track so hard, and what it means to the community as a whole.

To be clear, Deep Dip 2 is not intended for mere mortals like you and me. It's akin to watching an Olympic athlete like Simone Biles gracefully vault her way through a medal-worthy performance—except that every stumble or slight deduction sends the athlete hurtling into an abyss. Even as an experienced (if inept) Trackmania player myself, I struggled to get past the first tricky jump on Floor 0, and Floor 1 stymied my hopes for good.

According to organizer SparklingW, the Deep Dip concept stemmed from another infamously difficult game, Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. It seems simple—just climb to the top of a tower. But the platforming gets harder the higher you go, and one wrong move can send you all the way back to the bottom and erase hours of progress.

Watching streamers try and fail again and again to surmount Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy inspired SparklingW to try to build something similar in Trackmania. As he puts it, Deep Dip 2 is the "culmination" of that concept, with the mapping team throwing in every trick and technique they had to try to make it as tough as possible.

"Build quality is up, difficulty is up, punishment is up—but community engagement and interactions are also up," says SparklingW.

"Deep Dip is completely unique. There are many challenging maps in Trackmania, but no single map will keep people engaged for a full month," he continues. "Compared to the previous iterations, Deep Dip 2 is simply the next step. We want every tower to still feel unique and different to the [end], so we experiment—see what works, what doesn't, and take that with us to the next."

The difficulty of Deep Dip stems from two major sources. For one, players have no knowledge of each floor beforehand, which means that they're figuring out each trick as they go—you might compare it to a musician sight-reading a particularly tough song. And crucially, the contenders are not allowed to practice each floor separately. Getting another shot at braving the tricky jumps of Floor 14 meant Bren and the other competitors had to race through the obstacles of Floors 0 to 13 again and again and again, ad nauseam, for days on end.

For Deep Dip 2 specifically, the team decided to raise the degree of challenge even further by designing the map as a spiral. This meant every fall was near-certain to result in a full reset, as players were unlikely to land on a recoverable spot on the way down. "We decided on the spiral shape before we even began mapping our floors," SparklingW explains. "We wanted to really embrace the punishing nature of the challenge."

The original Deep Dip took Bren a scant six days to conquer back in 2022, so it's fair to say that the sequel turned up the heat quite a bit. It even led some in the Trackmania community to wonder whether the Deep Dip team had taken it too far. But while this unforgiving setup isn't for everyone, it makes the pursuit all the sweeter for determined champs like Bren.

"I personally really enjoyed the difficulty of the track," says Bren. "I think it made the achievement of crossing the finish line even more meaningful. It was intense and exhausting, but the struggle is what made it fun for me. I wouldn't want Deep Dip 3 to be easier—but I would understand if it is."

For members of the Deep Dip 2 team, the difficulty discussion is an ongoing conversation, and something they're still debating for their next event. SparklingW says that the difficulty of Deep Dip 2 is "in a good spot."

"It really pushes the limit of how hard a map like this can be," says SparklingW. "If it was any harder, it would have possibly been problematic for the enjoyment of the event. We are definitely pushing that limit now, but I don't think we've surpassed that limit yet."

Other members of the team express similar feelings. "I think the overall difficulty of the tower is good," says Doondy, one of Deep Dip 2's mappers. "I think where we failed is that the majority of the falls are a full tower reset, which is just too punishing to the player. It's too demotivating to drive such a hard map for 30 minutes only to fail one jump with so little hope that something will catch you."

Considering the size and scale of Deep Dip 2—a volunteer mapping project designed by 16 people over a period of 18 months—it seems almost impossible to strike that mythical perfect balance of difficulty to make everyone in the community happy. "There is no one person responsible for the tower, everyone's floor is their own, through and through," says Doondy.

What's more important is how Deep Dip 2 managed to grow the world of Trackmania overnight, bringing thousands of eyeballs to a relatively niche series that deserves more love from the larger gaming scene. One mapper, Whiskey, noted that the CEO of Trackmania reached out to personally thank the Deep Dip 2 team.

"I think we’ve created something special here, something never done before," says Whiskey. "It’ll be hard to top, but I trust we’ll be able to pull it off now that we know we have the full support of the community."

Bren says that the event brought a massive boost in viewership to his platform, to the point where he began streaming in English as a result. Over the next few months, he plans to focus on his streaming career to further capitalize on his win. He attributes his Deep Dip 2 triumph to patience and commitment to the track, as well as just sheer consistency.

"Finishing Deep Dip 2 requires a large panel of skills," he says. "It is not about being the best at one thing, but about being good at everything…It’s very easy to get tilted by every mistake or chaotic event in a run [that causes a] fall or a reset. Especially while trying to compete to be among the first finishers—you need to be able and ready to spend a colossal amount of time on these obstacles."

For organizer SparklingW, Deep Dip 2 is just the beginning. Having grown the mapping team quite a bit during its development, he says that racing fans should expect to see something new relatively soon—but it's unlikely to be Deep Dip 3, though that'll come eventually. He suggests that they may return to their roots by creating a sequel to "Bennett Foddy Ate My CPs," the prototype challenge map that eventually led to the creation of the original Deep Dip. And, of course, the mappers will continue to work on their solo efforts in the interim.

"We have a lot of plans for the future, which hopefully will allow us to do more projects—not just tower maps like Deep Dip, but fully embrace the creativity of this team of mappers and branch out into different projects as well," he says. "I am incredibly grateful to have gotten into this position where I can organize these projects, and I will definitely not give that up."

For those of us who struggle to get gold medals on even intermediate Trackmania courses, the idea of completing Deep Dip 2 will likely remain a pipe dream. Luckily for us, watching Bren and his competitors conquer its impossible geometries is a pleasure in itself—and one that you should sample if you haven't already.

Trackmania is available on the Epic Games Store.