Airtime Setting: the frozen city
The world explains the game's strangest fact: **the ground is ice, and people move across it at 1500 ups.** In Airtime's city, slick surfaces, huge drops, bowls, pipes and leets aren't arbitrary. They're what the city became.
The city#
A modern megacity that froze. A climate engineering project went wrong, and the winter never ended. The city is glazed in ice: highways are frozen rivers, towers drip icicles, plazas are rinks, and the old water channels and stormwater tunnels are natural pipes and bowls.
- Ice everywhere, naturally: drop-ins are frozen ramps, bowls are frozen fountains and reservoirs, half pipes are frozen canals. Icy maps make sense here.
- People: most live inside the heated towers. The runners are the ones who learned to move across the ice. Speed is survival: deliveries, messages, medicine, news.
- Life in the cold: lit windows, steam vents, markets in heated stations, and other runners everywhere (the crowd of ghosts).
The authority#
The authority runs the heated towers. It controls movement: people travel on approved routes, through heated corridors, under watch. Runners who use their own lines across the ice are hunted by its Wardens (story.md).
It's a dystopia, but a cold one, not a clean one. The authority owns the warm towers; the runners own everything else.
The runner culture#
Running became a culture and a sport. Runners record their lines, race each other's traces, paint records on walls, and build new lines with scavenged ramps. Every system in the game has its place in the world:
| Game system | In the world |
|---|---|
| Ghosts | Traces: runners' recorded runs, passed around on an underground network. You race the legends' traces. |
| Leaderboards | Tags: records painted on walls at the start and finish of each line, with times |
| Routes and leets | Lines through the city, and their dangerous shortcuts only the fastest make |
| Secrets | Hidden spots only a few runners have reached, rumoured on the network |
| Timer gates | Old turnstiles, checkpoint gates and sensor arches that runners rewired to time runs |
| The map editor | Building lines: runners bolt ramps, rails and ice sheets onto the city |
| Community maps | Lines built by other crews, shared on the network |
| Medals | Crew ranks per line |
| Online rooms | Crews running together |
Beyond the city, the simulator: floating architecture, impossible geometry, sky everywhere. Runners train there, and many community maps live there.
Places#
| Place | What it gives |
|---|---|
| The frozen highway interchange | long icy slides, banked curves, huge loops |
| The reservoir | a gigantic frozen bowl, drop-ins from the dam |
| Stormwater tunnels | pipes, tubes, half pipes in the dark, lit by your own lamp |
| The canal district | half pipes and quarter pipes along frozen canals, bridges to jump |
| The rooftops | normal ground: strafe jumps, walljumps between towers, ledges |
| The old Olympic park | ski jumps, huge ramps, a stadium: the runner culture's home |
| The heated core | the authority's towers, warm (no ice), glass, guards: where chases start |
| The glacier edge | where the city ends in a real glacier: natural ice, cracks, wind |
The feeling#
- Cold light, warm accents. Blue shadows and white ice, with orange sodium lamps, heater glow, neon signs from the heated core.
- Silence and speed. The city is quiet. The loudest sound is your blades and the wind.
- Freedom. The authority owns the warm towers; runners own everything else.
- Not grimy, not hopeless. It's a beautiful frozen world, and running is joy, not only escape.
Directions we didn't take#
- A clean, controlled city on its own (white, sterile, surveillance): Mirror's Edge owns it, and VHOLUME used a Ministry dystopia in 2026. Airtime keeps the authority, but the city is frozen and the dystopia is cold.
- Only a sport league (arenas, sponsors, commentators, like Trackmania): great for races, but no story and no chases. The runner culture keeps the sport inside the world.
- Only abstract dreamspace (floating maps, classic jump-map style): no stakes, no story. It lives on as the simulator.