Red Bull remembers 1080 Snowboarding

As part of their Throwback Thursday blog posts, Red Bull writer Ben Sillis wrote about 1080 Snowboarding and how it was a welcome departure from the traditional Nintendo formula. Just note througout this article that I’m not really much of an expert on 1080 Snowboarding, In fact I’ve barely ever played it so my opinions are anecdotal at best.

The post goes through a list of things that Sillis loves about 1080 Snowboarding, so I’ll just summarise what he likes about it for you:

• The tricks you can perform while racing down the mountain
• The soundtrack composed by Kenta Nagata
• The radness of the playable characters
• How the joystick controls made the game feel much more realistic

Besides this, the article is nostly a commentary of how the game works and its position within the Zeitgeist of when it was released. The point tSillis from Red Bull mentioned that really struck a chord with me was that even though it was developed by Nintendo, it doesn’t really follow many of the nintendo staples. First of all, it’s the only game I can think of that features realistic characters and environments rather than cartoonish ones like Mario and Zelda. Metroid and F-Zero don’t really count because they’re futuristic. That’s weird isn’t it? Even when I played this game at a friend’s house when I was younger, I couldn’t imagine that it was made by the same company. I would have imagined it to be made by someone along the lines of Probe or Acclaim, the makers of Extreme G. Nintendo would have been more likely to make a game along the line of Snowboard Kids.

Food for thought.

Anyway, in spite of my rambling, I hope that you do read the article. It’s definitely worth the skim =)