In this paper, we investigate carefully the blow-up behaviour of sequences of solutions of some elliptic PDE in dimension two containing a nonlinearity with Trudinger-Moser growth. A quantification result had been obtained by the first author in [15] but many questions were left open. Similar questions were also explicitly asked in subsequent papers, see Del Pino-Musso-Ruf [12], Malchiodi-Martinazzi [30] or Martinazzi [34]. We answer all of them, proving in particular that blow up phenomenon is very restrictive because of the strong interaction between bubbles in this equation. This work will have a sequel, giving existence results of critical points of the associated functional at all energy levels via degree theory arguments, in the spirit of what had been done for the Liouville equation in the beautiful work of Chen-Lin [8].