Highlights
- Steve Rechschaffner, founder of SuperNatural Studios, is creating a game with distinct SSX vibes that captures the larger-than-life style of the classic snowboarding franchise.
- The game will look to incorporate free-to-play elements, live competition, cooperative team-based features, and a sandbox social hub.
- Steve believes that the exhilarating nature of extreme sports, amplified by platforms like Youtube and TikTok, has sparked curiosity and interest among modern audiences, making the timing right for a spiritual successor to SSX.
Just recently, I spoke to Steve Rechschaffner, the mastermind behind the legendary yet long-gone EA Sports BIG label, about those halcyon days when EA dabbled in sports games that let go of reality. Remember? Remember when sports games actually dared to be different?
Years later, in 2021, Steve went on to found his own indie video game studio called SuperNatural Studios, where he’s been working on to creating a game that sounds an awful lot like an SSX game for the modern era. Sure, it doesn’t carry the SSX label, but courtesy of Steve I’ve now seen it in action with actual vertical-slice gameplay footage (which, alas, I can’t show here), and it sure as hell has that spirit.
The game is still in its very early stages, but already has those distinct SSX vibes, which haven’t really appeared in any snowboarding game since. The characters, while being less problematically ‘2000s’ (no Psymons here) are colourful, tricks see you bending and removing your board in impossible ways, and the courses look veritably deadly. In the footage of the 12-player race I saw, it’s modern SSX in all but name, though Steve believes that for the concept to fulfil its potential, it needs to be adapt to what gaming is today.
“I reached out to Larry [LaPierre, former producer at EA Sports BIG] and I literally said ‘I think we made SSX 20 years too early,’” Steve tells me. “And I said if we had been able to be free-to-play, if we had been able to just hook people and then bring the live competition and cooperative team-based stuff, and having a social connection and feeling like you have a place in the world, I think the world would love it.” This discussion was the foundation for Steve and Larry founding SuperNatural Studios.
Steve believes the SSX games have a ‘timeless quality’ about them, and playing them again recently, I’m inclined to agree. With most sports games heading full-speed towards simulation since then, that exhilarating larger-than-life style of SSX hasn’t really been replicated, and is notably missing from today’s games. The most notable modern snowboarding efforts have come from Ubisoft in the form of Riders Republic and Steep, but neither of those have power meters that fill up and culminate in your being able to unstrap your snowboard and ride it like a mechanical bull a 100 feet in the air.
The game will operate from a sandbox-style social village from which you can go out to various events, Steve tells me, and start with snowboarding but with the goal of eventually branching out to other winter sports. “The line I use is ‘sometimes the most fun happens in the parking lot,’” he begins. “And it's just fucking around with your friends. We did that way back in Skate, when we had the little mini-mode skate where you just went asynchronously head-to-head. That’s part of how we want to bring the social world to life.”
Stewing in nostalgia and trying to recreate the ‘good old days’ is not the goal for Steve. He believes that proliferation of extreme sports footage via easily digestible platforms like Youtube and TikTok has made way more people aware of these sports, and nurtured a ‘curiosity’ among modern audiences around these sports.
“People never watch a film or watch a whole event on anything (maybe the Olympics, where, by the way, skateboarding and snowboarding have about the highest ratings globally of any activities), but people are curious,” says Steve. “They like this superheroic nature. Like if they have a guy surfing on a 80-foot wave or somebody snowboarding down a cliff face on their Instagram feed, they'll watch it. They're like ‘holy shit, that's crazy. You think they're going to die?’ They'll watch it for 2 minutes or a minute or whatever. That's just not something people were doing when we made those first games.”
Steve knows that it’s still a long road ahead. The game is still in its early stages, and lost its publisher after “they had a huge revenue hole following a few big-scale free-to-play bets on console and PC.” He’s wary of the fact that funding is harder to find today than two years ago, “because everybody’s getting smaller, not bigger, and taking risks is not in the playbook for most people today.” He doesn’t want to take the crowdfunding route “because the amount of money to get it that top quality level is way beyond anything you can crowdfund at this point.”
So it’s not been an easy ride, but since then the game’s had some promising developments on the publishing front, the exact details of which Steve wasn’t at liberty to share with me at this time. The key thing to take from it is that the dream of a spiritual successor to one of the most exhilarating sports games ever made lives on.
Despite the footage I’ve seen clearly going for those superhero SSX stylings, Steve stops short of saying it’s a return for the series. “When people are like ‘oh, you’re trying to bring SSX back,’ it’s like ‘well no and yes,’” he says. “This is not intended or meant to be at all nostalgic. I'm not trying to bring back what we did, but like you said there are things there that are missing today, and the funny part is the people that never had it don't miss it because they never had it.”
It’s great to hear that Steve is building this game with the modern audience in mind, but make no mistake: as one of the many people who did have SSX in the early 2000s, seeing this new game in action not only gave me wistful flashbacks to those carefree days, but put into perspective how well it would fit into today’s gaming landscape.