Highlights
- The EA Sports BIG label released iconic games in the early 2000s, such as SSX Tricky and NBA Street, which captured the spirit of extreme sports witha unique, exaggerated style.
- While the later games from EA Sports BIG didn't reach the same heights as the early releases, games like SSX Tricky and NBA Street set a standard that has yet to be surpassed in the sports genre.
2001 was a vibrant time, a garish time. We were running around with Nokia 3310s with replaceable faceplates (I still remember owning a skull-themed one, with an impractical hologram over the screen obscuring everything I did). We were listening to the questionable sounds of Nu-metal—questionably procured off Kazaa—whose lyrics still find a way bubble up from the bowels of my long-term memory and belch out of my mouth sometimes. Christina Aguilera pioneered the low-slung jeans-and-whale-tail look much to the uncontrollable excitement of adolescents everywhere, and God knows what rags a 13-year-old me was trying to pass off as clothing back then.
2001 was also the time when extreme sports sprung out of the half-pipe and hit its peak, high on endorphins, adrenaline, and relentless commercialisation. The X Games, launched in 1995, had reached something of a zenith when Tony Hawk landed his legendary 900 in 1999, Shaun White became the face of snowboarding, and cable TV helped millions of casual viewers get a vicarious thrill from watching BMX’ers, skaters, snowboarders let go of gravity for seconds at a time before somehow safely landing back on the ground (well, most of the time anyway).
Amidst all that weird and wild stuff listed above, a PS2 game by the name of SSX Tricky came out, distilling the spirit of the era into a thrilling, hyper snowboarding game. This wasn’t the first game from the now-iconic EA Sports BIG label (that honour goes to the previous year’s SSX), but it was certainly its announcement on the big stage, kicking off several exciting years when sports simulation broke free of its realism chains to give us something we’d never seen before, or since.
Behind the whole EA Sports BIG brand was Steve Rechtschaffner, a former competitive skier who counts the invention of Olympic sport Boardercross (downhill snowboard races with jumps, or SSX, essentially) among his life’s achievements. Having connected with a producer at EA Canada “through fluke circumstances” in Vancouver, Rechtschaffner quickly got involved in the FIFA series during its fledgling years, before EA was even convinced that it was a great idea. “They weren’t super big supporters of the idea of FIFA, you know, they were thinking Madden was the way to go,” Steve recalls. “They were like ‘who wants soccer?’ Crazy to think that now, right? Anyway, so I joined the studio that was doing FIFA, and my very first game development team back then was maybe six people.”
It was a perfect time for Steve to have joined EA. With the rise in 3D graphics, he was able to apply his techniques and experience from producing extreme sports videos to FIFA and EA’s other early 3D sports games. “I love spectacle, and I was able to bring a different skill set than what anybody else had,” he reminisces. “Creating memorable moments like the first stadium fly-in and all these things was really special.”
Steve then worked as producer on the Triple Play Baseball series, where his sensibilities towards the extreme and arcadey began to shine through. “It’s funny to see it now, it was very arcadey, but I didn’t realise at the time how arcadey my sensibilities were,” Steve begins. “Within it, we started creating mini-games around the Home Run Derby that were specced to go beyond what you could do in the real world.”
Triple Play Baseball grew in the late 90s, as did the team working on it, which eventually gave Steve the resources to put together a crack squad to start working on a snowboarding game. Having designed real-life snowboarding tracks when he was putting together Boardercross, Rechtschaffner certainly had the experience to deliver a simulation, but he wanted to push things further. Despite being a freestyle skier, Steve says he “was never a very courageous guy. I was never the guy going off the jump doing triple flips. I dreamed about doing that but I didn’t have the confidence or courage,” he pauses. “All these things are expressions of all the things I wish I could be.”
Wanting to embody his wildest extreme sports fantasies in a video game, Steve conceived SSX. Released in 2001 as a launch title for the PS2, it was among the best-rated early games for the console, and took advantage of an otherwise weak launch lineup to succeed commercially. EA Sports BIG had stuck the landing, and within a year it had veritably exploded with SSX Tricky—widely regarded as the best snowboarding game of all time—and NBA Street, which brought the basketball court to urban backalleys and layered it over with a scritchy-scratchy hip-hop soundtrack.
True to the BIG style, NBA Street was more extreme and exaggerated than the mainline NBA games, though Steve (who wasn’t directly involved in the first NBA Street) thought they could’ve pushed things further. When he oversaw development of NBA Street Vol. 2, it was faster-paced, with brighter colours, a more cartoony art style, and, crucially, players who could jump way higher than in the first game. “We had decided on this very clear visual point-of-view and these kind of cel-shaded characters, and I can remember the most senior person in the entire company basically telling me I’m an idiot because ‘what people want today is photorealism.’”
Steve eventually persuaded the top brass at EA of his non-idiocy, and got to realise his vision for the second NBA Street game. Playing NBA Street Vol. 2 today, or even the later FIFA Street and NFL Street, it’s amazing how snappy and fun they still are; there’s still a unique experience that’s worth going back to. While the mainline NBA and FIFA games of 2002 inevitably pale in their realism next to their modern-day equivalents, the Street games were never truly surpassed by anything. In that way they’re frozen in time, capturing a cultural moment with their superhero-like twists on the day’s sports stars and their eclectic soundtracks, which combined well-known artists with more underground tracks.
Steve had been interested in up-and-coming musical talents since his days working in marketing at Swatch, where he helped the company put on what he says wass “the first ever hip-hop tour across America.” He wanted that same ‘underground’ musical feel in NBA Street. “There were a couple of folks who really drove that and brought interesting music—a lot of breakbeat and a lot of stuff I had never heard or listened to—but I could see what they were trying to do and created a space for that in the game,” he tells me.
EA Sports BIG’s love-in with contemporary music was made manifest with Def Jam Vendetta, a collaborative effort with legendary wrestling developer AKI Corporation (of WWF No Mercy and WCW/nWo Revenge fame) that pitted many of the biggest hip-hop artists of the day against each other in no-holds barred wrestling.
Despite heading up the EA Sports BIG label, Steve wasn’t actively involved with every game on it, and could only observe as some games weren’t hitting the mark. There was Freekstyle, for example, a motocross game (with the most ‘early 2000s trashy tribal’ cover art imaginable). “I’m feeding back to that group saying ‘look, you're building this whole world around physics that really shouldn't be locked down yet. You can't do that because if you finally find your physics and change it, it probably won't fit your world,’” he begins. “So your thought would have been to lead with the physics established, like you have the low gravity of the world and then build this crazy world around it that’s gotta be fun in a grey box, right? We had gone through a lot of pain to figure out how to do it ourselves and we weren't experts at it, but we knew what not to do.”
No game from the EA Sports BIG catalogue was exactly a critical or commercial flop, but the meteoric highs bars set by those early games—SSX Tricky, NBA Street Vol. 2, Def Jam Vendetta—eclipsed the later efforts, as well as the games like Shox, Sled Storm, or Freekstyle which attempted to mimic the SSX formula in rally cars, snowmobiles, and motocross, respectively. Steve led production on SSX 3 in 2003, an impressive follow-up to Tricky that cooled down on its predecessor’s campiness and had an open-world style with multiple courses wrapped around several mountains, each of which you could go down in one long half-hour run if you so wished.
Selling over one million copies, SSX 3 was the best-selling game in the series, which meant that EA, true to form, was already lining up the next one. “When we got to the end of SSX 3, we said ‘OK, we don't know where to go next with this, so we can't tell you we can deliver something in 18 months or two years,” Steve tells me. “We could explore, but I wasn’t sure we’d get to a result that says ‘we're committing’ and they were all about committing and I said I can't.”
That was the end of the road for Steve at EA Sports BIG. He and fellow BIG producer Larry LaPierre went over to work with Black Box Games on the Need for Speed series in 2004, leaving EA Sports BIG to plod on without him for another few years after that. Two more SSX games, SSX on Tour and the Wii-exclusive SSX Blur, were by no means terrible, but not nearly as popular as their predecessors, while sequel after sequel of the FIFA, NFL, and NBA Street games saw diminishing returns.
A more conservative turn in EA’s leadership in 2007, along with the global financial crisis the following year, saw EA close down many of its more experimental projects, with the EA Sports BIG brand getting the chop.
Was EA Sports BIG always destined to burn short and brightly? Steve doesn’t think so. “I think we could’ve had an enduring brand had it not fallen into the need to put out a bunch of games that weren’t ready. That’s one thing Nintendo never does,” he begins. “In some ways, I think what we created was a product of its times, but I think we also helped to define the times and I think there's values there that are timeless and those are the ones that inspire me.”
Steve went on to have a successful career in other parts of EA, before going on to found SuperNatural Studios in 2021 with LaPierre and other developers who have worked on games like Rocket League and Need for Speed. The desire to hit the powder once more clearly still burns in the company, as they’re currently working on a spiritual successor to SSX, focused around online play and a social hub branching off into different winter sports. “I think we made SSX 20 years too early,” Steve tells me. “And if we had been able to be free-to-play, if we had been able to hook people and then bring the live competition and cooperative team-based stuff, and have a social connection and feeling like you have a place in the world, I think the world would love it. So that’s what we’re doing now.”
Steve revealed more of this intriguing new project to me, which is currently seeking a publisher, but that’s a story for another (not too distant) day. For those of us who were there in the carefree days of EA Sports BIG, it’s warming to think that there are still those who’d see those days revived for a modern audience. And for those who’ve yet to experience the incomparable highs of SSX, or the original ‘Street’ takes on popular sports before everything became about simulation and realism, it’s not too late to go back. Because nothing’s stepped up in those 20 or so years to succeed them, they still feel as fresh as ever, containing a spark that sports games since then have lost.