What do you do when you’re a snowboarding prodigy? If you’re Shaun White, you start skateboarding and win medals for both Summer and Winter X Games in the same year. What happens then, when you’re one of the most popular and recognizable athletes in the world? You go and win a gold medal in the 2008 Olympics. And after that? Well, you make a skateboarding video game.
Shaun White Skateboarding is the athlete’s third game with Ubisoft, following up on Shaun White Snowboarding: Road Trip and Shaun White Snowboarding: World Tour. Skateboarding takes a bit of a left turn, though, by adding a story that has the board maestro fighting against a repressive regime. Players will add color and vibrancy back to the nameless cityscape by performing tricks and a unique mechanic lets you draw environmental elements into the world, by steering the trajectory of a trick’s path in certain areas. White recently visited New York City to promote the title and talked to Techland about why he likes skateboarding better than snowboarding and the comic-book inspirations for his latest video game.
What made you decide to have this new game be about skateboarding as opposed to snowboarding which you’re probably better known for?
Yeah. I mean, the main reason was that it was something new. But the second reason is that when you’re working on a snowboard game, it’s so hard because there’s not a lot to interact with. There’s rocks and trees and snow. That’s it. When you’re skating, you’re in cities–there’s cars, there’s people, there’s so much more interacting with things on the street. We found that was really intriguing.
Then, we had this great story idea to go with the whole skating-in-a-city thing, and the new technology was going to allow us to create something different from what was already out there. And that was my big concern. I walked in and I’m like, “What are we going to do that’s different? How do we separate ourselves from the games that are already out there?”
So you were aware of what’s out there?
Oh yeah. I play games. I’ve played all the other skate games. And that’s why this new tech was exciting because, in our game, you’re actually changing the level as you skate through it. No other skating game has that kind of gameplay. So, while you’re going through, you have this ability called “shaping” that allows you to bend and curve rails and take the ledges and different things where you want to go with them.
You’re allowed to reshape them, and you reshape them again. So, if you and I are playing the same levels, they’d look completely different because of the way you would skate compared to how I would skate.
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That’s a cool idea. Because the one thing I always hear from my friends who skate that there’s a certain creativity at play in terms of what tricks you choose at what time, and how you express yourself. So it’s kind of cool that you’re kind of embedding that mentality inside the mechanics of the game.
You’re not going from a list of professional riders. You’re you in the game. We’re not going, like here, be this guy or that guy! Like, you’re yourself man. So, yeah, individual creativity is part of what we want to the game to be all about. Go out there, choose the clothes you’re going to wear, skate the way you want to do it. “Change the world through skateboarding” has been kind of the slogan for what we’re trying to accomplish.
Skating games usually don’t have any kind of narrative to them. Why add a story to this game?
From the last two snowboarding games that I did, we didn’t really have a big storyline. So I was sitting there thinking, “Wow, it would be great to have a plot or have something else going on besides just, ‘Be the best!’” So, we worked with one of the writers from Family Guy, which was really cool. There’s one-liners and there’s that quick humor where you’re like, what did he say? There’s little details where, as you skate, this shockwave of influence goes out of your board, and trees shoot out of the ground, and everything changes around you. It can get so boring with “Cool, go over there and do a big air and win points.” We wanted to have these moments of interacting with various characters, and seeing them react to changes happening in the world.
If you really take the time to hang out, you’ll see that posters that were once saying one thing, are now saying something totally different. And they got funny slogans and sayings. Just those small details are really cool.
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So you’re kind of using the environment to tell a story?
Yeah, yeah. Funny things are going on all the time. And it’s definitely your job to take down The Ministry, who’ve been telling everybody what to wear and how to think and how to go through your life. When you do that, parts of the world in the game come back to life.
Speaking of the Ministry, where did the idea of a oppressive big brother organization like that come from?
It was kind of a mixture of The Matrix and V for Vendetta. But, also, there’s still the fact that we’re not really allowed to skateboard in a lot of places. I mean, you get in trouble all the time. If you go to a building to skate, or if you go to these places to skate, you’re told it’s against the law in some cities. It’s definitely a bummer. It’s unfortunate. There’s a whole skill-set that goes into this sport, and we’re not, like, daredevils. So, being able to go against that mentality in the game, that’s cool.
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I think people still have the conception of even pro skaters as being really reckless, when, really, there’s a huge emphasis on safety nowadays.
Yeah, we’re not crazy. Like, oh, I’ve got to got risk my life today! Things have changed and the old outlaw mentality that skating was about isn’t there anymore. It’s definitely more like, “Cool, I’m going to work on this trick or I’m going to hang out with my friends.”
Yeah, it’s funny that you say that because you see so many more people skateboarding now as you did even like five years ago. And, you would figure that public attitudes would change a little, but they really haven’t.
And skateboarding’s so accessible. Snowboarding’s tough, because you ‘ve got to go to the mountains. For me, I love the skateboard season because I get to hangout at home and still be skating. I don’t have to travel to Norway or Japan or these crazy places to be snowboarding.
Now, this is your third game. What have you learned about the development process up until this point?
The first time around with this game, I just assumed everything was cool and it was easy to create. You could have this monster show up and then this crazy sequence of, like, flying through the air. It was video game land. And I just thought anything was possible. Truth is, anything is possible but it takes a certain amount of programming and time. And let’s face it, some things are more important than others. There’s no point in putting a monster in the game if the skating doesn’t feel right. So, now that we’ve gone through a couple versions of the game, I’m able to go in there with a better idea and be creative in term what’s actually possible. So, I could be like, “Look, I know from the last game that a certain idea is impossible but, with the changes in the technology, totally looks like something we could accomplish.” So, we’d work on it.
So you’re actually throwing design ideas in there?
Absolutely. And being able to change the landscape while you skate was such a big maybe, like we didn’t know if we were going to be able pull it off. It’s like, I’m not a programmer, dude, but I do know that processing that change has to be intense, you know what I mean? To have things changing while you’re going through doesn’t happen in a lot of other games.
Watching the technology evolve has been cool. The first couple rounds [of development] had it where the rails only bent a certain direction. I was like, well that doesn’t really accomplish what we’re going for. That’s basically like the rail’s already there but it’s just invisible until you get on it. That’s not a lot of creativity. Then, over time, we got to the point where you actually create your own lines now. So, I’m excited to see what happens when people really start getting into the game and like creating their own lines that we didn’t even think about.
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.