Slopecrashers Aims to Bring Arcade Feel Back to Extreme Sports Games

gamerant.com:

There’s always been a market in the games industry, however small, for extreme sports titles. Fans of skiing, snowboarding and rally racing can come about as close as possible to the real thing by playing games like Steep or the DIRT franchise. However, there’s still an appetite for extreme sports games that are a little less heavy on realism. That’s a niche that Byteparrot, the one-man studio behind upcoming combat-racer Slopecrashers, is hoping to fill.

The arcade snowboarding game is less of a simulation and more of an over-the-top take on extreme sports in the style of SSX and similar titles. Game Rant sat down with lone developer Johannes Lugstein to talk about his inspirations and where Slopecrashers fits into the genre.

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Lugstein’s interest in extreme sports games was kindled when he was younger, but not by one of the genre’s better known entries. “Probably the biggest influence, one of the reasons the game actually exists, is Snowboard Kids on the N64,” he said.

Snowboard Kids, released in 1997, is an arcade snowboarding game similar in style to Lugstein’s Slopecrashers. Both titles feature item-based combat and a lineup of non-traditional racing locations. Racjin, the game’s developer, released a sequel in 1999, but it never hit store shelves in Lugstein’s native Austria, he said. Snowboard Kids got a Nintendo DS reboot in 2005, but since then, the franchise has gone quiet.

Despite that, Lugstein recalls how important Snowboard Kids was to his childhood. “When I was a kid, I had three games on N64: Mario 64, Mario Kart, and Snowboard Kids,” he said. “For some reason, that was the game my sister and I played all the time.”

Of course, Slopecrashers is inspired by