I have traveled in Second life these past years and have seen many interesting and curious and fun things. One thing I came upon about 3 years ago was something called the Great Snail Races, and at that time had seen a couple few of these amazing and fun races. Every time I would go to one they seemed to draw a great crowd of people, and I always found the events fun and exciting. As we all known times can get busy between real life and our second life and or one or the other and I some how lost track of these races. Luckily some group that I belong to sent out a slurl, and low and behold it was about these Great Snail Races!! At the time I was at a sandbox building and packed up my gear and off to the races I went. This time while I reminisced I was also going to get some information (curious me...smiles) of the origin of these events, or hoped to. Many of my blog readers may have seen this or some of this information in the past years from other sources but if not its very interesting how things can evolve! Enjoy
At the Race I grab a seat among a crowd that had already began to form, I imed one of the commentators which were broadcasting live from Treet Tv and asked when they had time to pass me some history on the races. This is what was written by RacerX Gullwing the creator of the very first Snail, and how it came to be what it is today.
This quoted paragraph information I received from Racer, and I am sure it was originally written a couple years ago or so due to the Great Snail Races had their 5th annual Anniversary Nov 28th 2009. You can see that event CLICK HERE There are lots of videos at Treet about different events the Snail races have been involved in as well, that one I gave will give you a good starting point!
RacerX Gullwing: hi
RacerX Gullwing: I been hosting the Giant snail races almost 6 years now
RacerX Gullwing: I made the base snail and they eventually became modable
RacerX Gullwing: now everyone does there own style
He then passes me a notecard and says, RacerX Gullwing: "that's the actual history a few typos in there i think." I told him thank you! Here is what he said,
"about the snail race history,
It all started with a contest called Giant Avatar contest I saw was coming up in a few days back when events were only a few a day and finding them was easy. I went to the sandbox where you could usually work for about 30 minutes at a time between sim crashes
and started attaching prims to my feet but that didn't make you any taller just made prims that went into the ground. So I thought about it and figured the way I'd have to do this is be in the foot. I didn't have a clue how to script legs to move and back then movement scripts didn't work in avatars anyway . Narrowed it down a bit to a one footed animal . The shell was maxed out at 30 meters or maybe I just remember it that big. Thing is I didn't have a clue how to see out of that so had to stop a lot and cam outside the shell to see where I was.
It was hilairious I got to the contest about 20 minutes early and the guy holding it told me to please park off to the side somewhere I thought he was stearing me over there because I had obviously won and he didn't want to discourage the other avatars. Ends up I was the only one that took it him literally and made a giant avatar. Well I didn't win.
I was in a group called Montmartre Artists and we were trying to get on the most popular places list before camping chairs were invented and were each asked to come up with an event Mae Best had not another Quiz every other night it seemed like and that alone got us up to about 30th or so but not the top 20 anyway I was trying to come up with an event and talking to my good scripting friend and neighbor in fujin Catfart and he suggested giant snail racing.
That's where it all started that's when I put together a better cuter av with blinky eyes that everyone loves and they haven't changed much since. We did get into the top 20 a couple times.
It started on the ground using stone paths that circled montmartre I made all the
arrows and things needed for the racers to rez from a single prim and go find their spot in the sim just for the race then I'd go around after the race and shout the race is over and all of the signs of the race track would vanish just leaving the stone path built by May Best. They also went down the city streets of Chase Rutherford's Manhattan in the Hawthorne sim an Aimee Weber build, at 8 pm on tuesday nights. The thing that brought them to an end was mostly due to
the physics in sl where if you can find something to trip over you can fall a lot faster than anyone can run. Also once you get into that falling state you can close chat bar and hold the space bar down and get yourself to glide a long ways.
So I moved the race up into the sky onto a perfectly flat surface where there is nothing you can trip over. Same time Seifert Surface was experimenting with a transportation system that would use push and throw you across the map. He had set this set of flingers up at the future sim just one Sim south of Montmartre and owned by Chase Rutherford.
In fact I Used his experiments as the track, I just built the course around them. The race stayed in the future sim as it changed hands to Gus Plisskin, who said It was welcome to stay as long as I wanted to have it there. but the sim slowly filled to capacity and had a lot of scripts going and the flingers stopped working consistently and the sport became more of a luck thing but eventually become an endurance race. I got Seifert Surface to give me a copy of his experiments and carefully packed it all into a prim and moved it all back to where it started from Montmatre. Also if you go to http://www.sluniverse.com/pics/ and look search using the tag snail race you can see 99 percent of that history there. the snail race is only a few months older than snapzilla. Snail races will be three years old at the end of november and have been held every Saturday but canceled 2 or 3 about a year ago when I was very sick."
This is the actual Race I saw the other night, was the big final race of season 5
Supporting great events like this is all part of what keeps Second life creativity alive, and keeps the good and wholesome fun going on!
