SSX came from a man who had invented a sport. Steven Rechtschaffner, its executive producer, had been a competitive freestyle skier and a television producer before he joined EA Canada, and while filming a stunt show at Whistler Blackcomb in British Columbia he had dreamed up boardercross: a motocross-style race for snowboarders. The game, Snowboard Supercross or SSX for short, kept the race and threw away the realism, with jumps so long that the team compared take-off to “a plane taking off from the tarmac”. Edge was surprised to find an EA game “oddly laden with enthusiasm and personality, bereft of the corporate franchise feel that marks the interminable Madden and FIFA series”.
Fast facts
- Developer: EA Canada, Vancouver.
- Publisher: Electronic Arts, as the first game on its EA Sports Big label.
- Platform: PlayStation 2 only; one of the console’s launch games in America and Europe, late 2000.
- Name: Snowboard Supercross; earlier working titles included Super Boardercross and King of the Hill.
- Players: one, or two on a split screen.
- Riders: eight, among them Mac, Kaori, Elise and Zoe.
Making it
Rechtschaffner first suggested a boardercross game when he arrived at EA Canada, but it did not go ahead. Instead he worked on FIFA and then helped launch EA’s Triple Play baseball series. Its success earned him what the studio called a “silver bullet”: a producer with a hit could make something new. He told Wireframe that if a new game failed, “you lost that silver bullet and you had to have another success before you could get another opportunity”.
The game began with one designer, Adam MacKay-Smith, who had worked on Need for Speed II. “I ended up spending a year and a half on that game all by myself,” he said. “The odds were against us – no one thought a snowboarding game was going to do good.” He took ideas from the arcade games in EA Canada’s lobby, among them Sega’s Top Skater and Midway’s NFL Blitz, but named Psygnosis’s WipEout as the biggest influence, on the game’s feel, its rewards and its electronic music. The music budget, he recalled, was $100,000 for the whole soundtrack, “at the time, FIFA had, like, $100,000 [to license] one song”. The team kept adjusting the physics, and producer Larry LaPierre described the result: “you hit the apex, there’s this pause, and then all of a sudden you’re dropping like an anchor.” The game was delayed by six months for polish.
Playing it
The player picks a rider, a board and a mountain, and races down it against the others. Winning races and performing tricks unlocks more riders, boards and courses. In the air, Edge explained, “tricks can be performed by using the D-pad for turns and the L and R buttons for grabs. The longer the grabs are held, the more points are accrued.” Tricks also fill a boost meter, which the rider can spend on extra speed. The right analogue stick swings the rider’s arms, so “well-timed punches can knock down opponents”.
The courses were full of alternative routes and shortcuts. Tokyo Megaplex was modelled on the inside of a pinball machine. The last track, Untracked, came from MacKay-Smith’s first idea for the game, a climb to “the mysterious powder track… where there were no rules”.
Edge thought the graphics had “moments of splendour” but no more than that, with ice “still picked out in the same non-reflective pale blue that’s been used to represent it since the 8bit era”. The handling made up for it. It compared the analogue control with Nintendo’s 1080° Snowboarding, noted the impact of every landing, and found the two-player split screen ran with “no noticeable slow down at all”.
SSX Tricky and after
EA’s sales and marketing staff wanted a sequel fast, and SSX Tricky followed in 2001, after MacKay-Smith had left. It added courses, a rivalry system in which knocking opponents over started feuds, celebrity voices including David Arquette, Lucy Liu and Macy Gray, and a new rider, Psymon Stark, who appeared in every SSX game afterwards. LaPierre called it “kind of SSX 1.5”. SSX 3 (2003) replaced separate courses with one continuous mountain, and was the first in the series to sell more than a million copies.
EA Sports Big added NBA Street, Freekstyle and Sled Storm among others, but Rechtschaffner believed the label suffered when EA tried to release its games every year: “I looked towards Nintendo and I said, ‘I think we should bring out a new game every two to three years.’” When SSX returned in 2012, on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, it moved to real mountains such as Patagonia and the Antarctic, with “deadly descents” that used wingsuits and headlamps, and a button to rewind time. Edge gave it five out of ten, finding that it had veered “away from some of the fun and fireworks of yesteryear”.
Sources
- Edge issue 91, December 2000, pp. 100–101: SSX review (EA Sports Big; “oddly laden with enthusiasm and personality”; choosing rider, board and mountain; unlocks; tricks and grabs; punches; the graphics; the control and 1080° Snowboarding; split screen).
- Jack Yarwood, “Extreme sports”, Wireframe issue 50, April 2021, pp. 70–75: Steven Rechtschaffner and boardercross; the “silver bullet” rule; Adam MacKay-Smith; the working titles; influences; the music budget; Larry LaPierre on the physics; the six-month delay; eight riders; Tokyo Megaplex and Untracked; SSX Tricky, SSX 3 and the label’s decline.
- Official New Zealand PlayStation Magazine issue 38, October 2000: PlayStation 2 release schedule (SSX among the launch games).
- Wikipedia, “SSX (2000 video game)” (web, secondary): North American and European release dates; the boost meter filled by tricks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSX_(2000_video_game)
- Edge issue 239, April 2012, p. 116: SSX (2012) review (EA Canada; Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3; real-world locations; “deadly descents”; the rewind; five out of ten).