1080° Snowboarding was the greatest snowboarding game of all time
Yes, SSX Tricky was pretty good, even if it was trying a bit too hard. The Cool Boarders series on the PS1 was decent. Some people liked Amped on Xbox, I never played it, but I’m sure it was fine. But none of them were as good as 1080° Snowboarding.
The N64 game had perfectly smooth racing gameplay, with big, interesting tracks and an addictive trick attack mode on the half pipe and jumps. It had maybe the coolest soundtrack on the N64 as well.
Now one of the key developers on the game, Giles Goddard, has revealed he is working on a spiritual sequel to 1080° Snowboarding.
(Ok, yes, there was 1080° Avalanche on the Gamecube, but that wasn’t anywhere near as good).
In an interview with Eurogamer, Goddard says he is working on getting that 1080° Snowboarding just right.
“The process of the original 1080° Snowboarding was tweaking and tweaking the controls almost from day one through to debugging,” says Goddard. “And I think it shows in the way that it’s an extremely – and obviously I’m biased – but it’s an extremely well-balanced game in the controls.”
“1080° Snowboarding, I feel at least, there was so much depth to the control system, things like crouching down to go faster and then you have less control, when you jump and in order to soften the landing if you time the button press right your legs take the impact.”
“One of the reasons for doing 1080° Snowboarding originally was to show off the controller of the N64 – the analogue stick side of it. Nintendo games up until that point were left, right, up and down. All the games that come out with the N64 were very much focussed on the controller, and that pushed us towards that analogue feel.”
Goddard has only just started working on a prototype at his Kyoto-based studio Vitei, so the game is a long way off – but we are still very excited.
