Tribes was brilliant. Skiing down procedural terrain (and watching other people ski up it), big maps, lots of players, in 1999.

Tribes was an absolute riot. Teams keep trying to make new versions but none feel like they capture the pure magic of the original.

The original is out there and free now. Though the community is gone :(

Quite possibly my favourite game growing up (especially Tribes 2!)

In fact, I downloaded Tribes 2 a while back and was playing against bots just a few months ago.

The game is dated but it was still fun... in fact, I've often thought of trying to remake it in Unity or something!

Maybe one day.

I never liked tribes 2 being a tribes 1 addict. The jet sliding in 1 was a happy accident and the developers lost the original physics code that resulted in the sliding being a controllable skill. Tribes 2 had an utterly different movement sensation and a “press button to glide” mechanic that just killed the game for me.

There is a whitepaper exploring similar netcode concepts that was written by the Tribes developers:

https://www.gamedevs.org/uploads/tribes-networking-model.pdf