The original TuxKart website is still online, and it looks exactly like the sort of page that could have convinced a Linux user in 2000 to compile a kart racer for no sensible reason.
Visit the original TuxKart site
Steve and Oliver Baker’s page introduces a game starring Tux, the Linux penguin, with six racetracks and the wonderfully modest assessment that it “plays pretty reasonably.”
That tiny project has a much longer shadow than the page suggests.
Before SuperTuxKart
The modern SuperTuxKart project’s own history traces the original TuxKart to April 2000. Steve Baker created the game for his son Oliver, who helped design tracks, and the project used PLIB, a graphics library Steve had also created.
Development eventually entered maintenance mode, with the final original TuxKart release arriving in March 2004.
Then things got messy in the traditional open-source way.
A Linux Game Tome “Game of the Month” effort tried to improve TuxKart in 2004. The later SuperTuxKart history describes that effort as going badly enough that the project became unstable and effectively died. A fork named SuperTuxKart emerged from the wreckage, was later revived, and ultimately became the actively developed cross-platform kart racer known today.
The descendant still carries fossils from the original.
The SuperTuxKart team points to ideas and track lineage that reach back to TuxKart, including Oliver’s Math Class, rescue behavior, penalty concepts, and the zipper speed boost.
That makes the old SourceForge page more than a download page for an obsolete game.
It is the visible root of a software family.
The page also preserves a specific era of Linux gaming when a developer could put up screenshots, thank Larry Ewing for Tux, link to source and downloads, admit to a couple of bugs, and call the project usable.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains many surviving project pages whose importance only became obvious after later forks, communities, and software ecosystems grew from them.
TuxKart is one of those little ancestors still sitting on the web.