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.”
It’s early days, though having seen one of the initial prototypes for the snow dynamics I can confirm that it’s super impressive. There’s an element of fidelity and authenticity that’s striking, all taking place on a mountain culled from real-world data in a 1:1 representation.