What are your views on the current skating game landscape? It’s kind of weird when you think about the total shift that’s happened, right? Tony Hawk used to be the king at least in terms of video game skating. And now I think Skate is proving probably most people’s go-to game. Do you think that represents something in terms of how people approach video games now?
I don’t want to pinpoint one game or the other, but I definitely feel like Skate did something new. The fact that it made skateboarding so realistic was interesting, and the most entertaining thing was that you could get on there and feel like you’re actually skating. The bummer about the game is that you have to skate in order to understand the controls. You know what I mean?
I do. I know exactly what you mean.
Like if you don’t know how to skate, you don’t know anything about the tricks, and you try to play the game, you’re like, “God, why is this so hard? I’m not even doing anything that rad.”
The physics feel like really, really like annoying at first. It’s like, oh wait, I should be able to just jump.
It took me three hours to do one thing. And you’re just like, “Why is this so hard?” You know what I mean? It’s almost like why play the video game? Why not go play real guitar on the thing. It drives me nuts. What’s cool is that I’ve found that we’re definitely in the middle there.
Control-wise, we’re letting you toggle it where you actually have to do the motion of an ollie or just push a button to do a trick. And then within the realms of what’s possible, I just felt like, yeah, I don’t really street skate that much, so it’s awesome to have a lot of street skating in the game. I think we hit that that middle ground of not so far out there, and still true to the sport, that it’s a fun medium. You can actually like, go do authentic skateboard tricks but then you have these abilities to reshape the world. It being a video game opens up that kind of possibility. And that’s cool.
What did you think of the board controller for Tony Hawk Ride? Lots of people thought it was too difficult to use. I mean, the idea was great, but I feel like something from the implementation was missing.
Yeah. It definitely felt strange where it was like, I don’t know…
I mean, you’re somebody who’s on a board like 16 hours a day, probably….
Yeah. Yeah. I’m sure it was lot easier for me than for others. I grew up in this stance. You know what I mean? I trip walking down the stairs, but I can skate them probably. So, that board controller probably felt more natural to me than to other people who played the game. But what’s funny about that skateboard controller is that it almost seemed like the craze at the time was to add this other element. They wanted to add something like the plastic guitars and the drums in Rock Band, I guess.
But, was that something different making the gameplay better or not? That’s what’s hard when you have multiple games in a series; you have to revamp it every time a new one comes out. You know what I mean? If I was sitting here with another snowboard game, you’d be like, well, how’s this different from the last one? And, I’d be like,”Well, we took the same level but we really beefed it up with this and that.” And it’s hard to do that to the same game. So you’ve got to imagine, Tony’s had this same game for the past how many years? They wanted to do something different and there’s always a risk there.
It’s the same situation with [Shaun White Skateboarding]. You’re trying to better that thing and it doesn’t always work. And so, you can see for me to get into this new tech now is exciting because we’re bringing like a whole another opportunity within the gaming to create your own self-expression.
Yeah, when I saw it at E3, I was really impressed. It’s an intriguing idea that looks amazing.
Thank you. Yeah, and you add in the storyline and all the other stuff, and it creates this like, OK, cool, like I’m in for a reason. I’m doing this. I’m not like collecting random objects for no reason. I’m like, I have a goal.
It’s almost like skater sci-fi.
Yeah. I guess you could call it a metaphor, or whatever, for skate culture but we just really wanted the game to have a story so it could stand out.
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So, aside from skating games, what else are you playing nowadays. What are you looking forward to coming out?
So I play a lot of Wii normally on the road because it’s just easier to pack. Because I travel with snowboards, and I play guitar, so I travel with amps and pedals and all this stuff. They love me at the airport. Other than that, working on this game has been a full-time mission.