Snowboarding and Snowboarding Games

This page collects my notes-in-progress on the interrelated topics of snowboarding and snowboarding (video) games. My engagement with this topic is certainly informed by my personal love for, and practice of, snowboarding. However, my purpose is maintaining and extending these notes is most directly about contributing to game studies through the interpretation, the close reading, of video games that represent snowboarding.

Overall, my hope is to be able to consider the relationship between the young and rapidly evolving sport of snowboarding and the also young and rapidly evolving arena of video games. When we consider how snowboarding is "adapted" into videogame format, we need to take account of how much in flux snowboarding was and is - it is not at all a stable object to be translated into another format. A basic hypothesis is that snowboard video games (along with other forms of late twentieth and early twenty-first century new media) are a fundamental part of how snowboarding is constituted as a practice.

Here are some points of focus I imagine, to be applied in the interpretation of snowboarding games:

use of snowboarding language ("gnarly" etc)
representation (or not) of the tensions with skiing and skiers
closely related to the preceding point: snowboarding as its own game vs. included in games that feature multiple "winter sports". (This is interesting because in real-life people do not switch so easily between these sports, And also because of its disjunction with the early skiier/snowboarder tension.)
safety and injuries (do people wear helmets in snowboard video games - if not, when do they start?)
options/configurations (type of board, binding configuration, etc)
what kind of terrain is represented in the game? Tthis question can be asked at a micro and macro level, for example, are real-world hills modeled in the games? and how? what kind of overall shapes for courses are modeled? but also: what kind of terrain features exist - jumps, rollers, jibbing surfaces, half-pipes, etc etc etc?

Early Snowboarding (Video) Games

Heavy Shreddin' (NES, June 1990) is the first item on Wikipedia's list, so apparently the "first" snowboarding video game. This coincides roughly with the founding of the International Snowboard Federation, and precedes the inclusion of snowboarding in the Winter Olympic Games by 8 years. This is only 13 years after the founding of Burton in 1977 (and those 1977 snowboards had water-ski foot traps for bindings.)

TODO: need to buy a copy of Heavy Shreddin' cartridge.

1996's Cool Boarders (which I've been playing via PS5) is 4th on the list. Cool Boarders 1 2 3 and 4 came out in 1996, 1997, 1998, and 1999 respectively - so one per year! Quite the schedule. There was also a 1998 arcade Cool Boarders: Arcade Jam, and a 2000 pocket version for the Neo Geo Pocket Color. Cool Boarders: Code Alien (2000) was only released in Japan. There's a cool boarders 2001 that was only released in North America.

I need to remember to pay attention to the SSX series, which first appears in 2000. There's some indication of popular discursive comparison of Cool Boarders and SSX in the Wikipedia article about Cool Boarders 2001.

In the Wikipedia history of snowboarding, after the watermark of the 1977 founding of Burton, it looks like all the dates are connected to competitive snowboarding (races, championships, International Snowboard Federation, olympics and paralympics). While interesting, these dates don't necessarily tell the story of everyday snowboarding by "normal people" though. Further down the Wikipedia article has shorter paragraphs about (each of) snowboard films, magazines, and video games. Curiously nothing about books, although there are definitely some that exist. So, a predictable structure of discourse around this then - competition in first place, cultural representations acknowledged but distinctly in second place, everyday practices and people completely erased.

Val d'Isère Skiing and Snowboarding (1994, Atari Jaguar), another one of the earliest snowboarding video games, mentions a specific French ski hill in its title. How is the hill represented in the game beyond the name? Why this specific hill over all of the others that could be named? (Note: looks like it was developed by a French studio.)

Other Resources

Wikipedia maintains an entry about snowboarding, as well as an extensive list of snowboarding video games (together with a separate list of snowboarding games for mobile platforms).

The bibliography of this article has lots of scholarly references (and some grey literature, including a book or two) to follow up that speak to snowboarding's history: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02614367.2012.685334#d1e597