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.