Giles Goddard, alumni of 90s Nintendo, one of the first western employees within the company's Japanese dev team and a key figure behind the original 1080° Snowboarding, has begun work on a spiritual successor. And it sounds pretty amazing.
Goddard's been working on a prototype for a while in his spare time, starting with a VR-focussed effort in Unity and more recently switching over to Unreal Engine for a more traditional third-person take as production has ramped up. The new game looks to double down on what made the original 1080° Snowboarding special, while folding in some new ideas that make the most of modern hardware.
"Technology has changed," explains Goddard. "You can now have 100 players on a single mountain, and they're all playing each other, and you can real-time stream to YouTube - people can start playing with you and then stream with really fast networking and proper multiplayer.
"I'm aiming to emulate the snow across an entire mountain - that means overnight snowfalls lays fresh snow, you jump on your snowboard and go down and then compress the snow, and as you turn the snow pushes out and sprays across which then creates a new lump there which other people can then jump on that. It's basically simulating snow realistically - a fluid simulation, but with snow."
With the new, nuanced simulation of snow that's at the heart of this 1080° Snowboarding successor, that element of playing off the terrain should be enhanced - and when you're sharing the slopes with other players, it's an element given new depth
It's exciting and ambitious, though it's worth noting that it's still very early days - Goddard had been working on his own on a prototype, and it's only recently that the project has begun to gain momentum and gather more staff at his Kyoto-based studio Vitei. Jake Kazdal of fellow Kyoto studio 17-bit - a fellow snowboarder who takes to the slopes with Goddard - is also involved, giving the project a neat bit of symmetry. Back when Goddard was making 1080° Snowboarding at Nintendo, over in Redmond Kazdal was working on Twisted Edge Snowboarding, which released around the same time.
