Barton Lynch Pro Surfing 2022 Seeks to Resurrect a Long-Lost Sports Sub-Genre

ign.com:

Back in the early 2000s, surfing was one of several sports being well-served in the video game space. Treyarch’s Kelly Slater's Pro Surfer, published on Xbox, PS2, and GameCube under Activision’s long-defunct Activision O2 brand, is one high-profile example – but there were plenty of others. Krome produced Championship Surfer for PC, PlayStation, and Dreamcast in 2000, and also Sunny Garcia Surfing for PS2 in 2001. Angel Studios (which later became Rockstar San Diego) released Transworld Surf on Xbox, PS2, and GameCube between 2001 and 2003. The surf-obsessed may even remember Surfing H3O, although you might be better off forgetting that one.

And then, the tsunami of surfing games stopped. Waxheads were waiting for more, but the surfing sub-genre was sunk.

“Perhaps I need my head read,” jokes Bungarra Software CEO Andrew West when asked why he thinks it’s been effectively two decades since a sport-focused surfing game surfaced. Based in Fremantle, Western Australia, Bungarra is the developer of Barton Lynch Pro Surfing 2022 – an ambitious new surfing game bearing the name of 1988 ASP World Tour Champion and Australian Sporting Hall of Famer Barton Lynch, available now on Steam Early Access.

“We started back then and we were working on a version of surfing for a publisher, so we actually lived through all of that time,” says West. “It’s an interesting question. Back then it was a Tony Hawk and SSX-inspired gold rush of sorts.”

West attributes the wipeout to low sales and a perceived lack of depth in the genre.

“For a large, publicly-listed entity like Activision, the sales for games like Kelly Slater or Mat Hoffman were probably never going to see sequels because, for Activision, I guess the numbers for them didn’t stack up,”