This year marks the 20th anniversary of SSX Tricky, the legendary snowboard game widely considered to be among the best PS2 titles ever. If you were hoping for an official remaster, there is something much more interesting sliding down the pipe.
The executive producer of the first three SSX games Steve Rechtschaffner told Laptop Mag that he is working on a brand new snowboarding IP that shares similar arcade action sports values as SSX.
Codenamed Project Gravity, the free-to-play live service snowboarding game is already being developed by Rechtschaffner and his team at Supernatural Studios. The game will take the arcadey, accessible and fun gameplay you know and love, while adding creative and social elements, like course building or specific spots to trick together.
Supernatural Studios is keen to launch in a focused way with a smaller amount of content to start and to build from there. “It wouldn’t be like we’re shipping a retail game because if we do our job right, a lot of these courses and experiences have deep replayability through progression and competition," Rechtschaffner told us.
The aim to take a “live service” approach will allow the studio to experiment and “introduce new content, course elements, locations, characters, live events and a variety of other fun and unexpected goodness.”
In an exclusive interview with Laptop Mag, we asked Rechtschaffner if this would be a spiritual successor to SSX, or something a little closer (maybe in name) to it. He highlighted how interesting the concept of a spiritual successor is.
“A lot of things that excite us are creative extensions of experiences that we would’ve liked to create at that time, but couldn’t. But what we are working on is not rooted in the world of SSX.”
“We’re not nostalgic in the sense that we want to bring something back. If we were, we’d be working with EA to create a reboot of SSX. It’s not that at all. We don’t want to be beholden to people’s expectations of where that goes,” he continued.
“But we do want to make this arcadey, amazing-feeling, very accessible, competitive and fun game.”
As for where Project Gravity goes from here, Rechtschaffner is currently in talks with an unannounced publisher, but no specific dates are in place. He did, however, say the goal is “to get something out there that people can start experiencing sooner rather than later.”
These details, including the existence of Project Gravity, were confirmed in a full interview we will publish alongside a retrospective review of SSX Tricky. Anyone looking for a remake can support a project emerging on Reddit although it sounds like Project Gravity will give virtual adrenaline junkies the rush they've been craving.
