Shaun White Snowboarding

Some of us simply weren’t built for the snow. It’s cold, it’s slippery, and it doesn’t react well to uncoordinated limbs made cumbersome by too many layers of Gore-Tex. There’s the whole lifestyle thing as well: snowboarders are essentially cold-weather skateboarders; sporty types who were instantly appalled by the awkwardness of skiing and instead jumped straight onto a cooler-looking board and starting flipping themselves all over the place.

Regardless of the problems associated with the realities of getting onto a board, snowboarding titles were only recently a staple of the console market. It’s easy to see why – professional snowboarding is, in a Tony Hawk’s kind of way, great fun, full of possibilities and pleasing to the eye, with plenty of characters and outrageous moves on tap. Shaun White Snowboarding is Ubisoft’s attempt to throw itself down the slopes and get all ‘extreme’ on everybody’s respective asses – and the publisher has pulled out all the stops to give lucky punters a fresh look at the sport.

Shaun White himself is a fixture on the snowboarding circuit, and something of a celebrity to boot. Having been competing since he was 14, it’s fair to say he knows what he is doing and has a few suitably impressive moves. He’s known as the flying tomato, presumably because he has been given the gift of masses of ginger hair, and has managed to become one of the biggest stars in the sport.

An Olympic gold medal winner, he’s a regular at the X Games and has even won skateboarding tournaments, just to prove his prodigious talent on the board isn’t strictly limited to the snow. All in all, he’s the closest thing snowboarding has to David Beckham, making him the natural choice for this title. “He brings authenticity and professional hands-on guidance within the development team,” comments senior brand manager Phil Brannelly.

“Ubisoft Montreal houses a lot of snowboarders so there was a definite passion there anyway but we had to make sure we did it right. At the helm, we’ve got Shaun White, who is definitely on the way to becoming the new Tony Hawk. He’s a living legend in his field.”

Not as prominent as they once were, titles based around the more extreme end of the sporting spectrum have been on the wane in recent years – making Ubisoft’s entry into the market with Shaun White Snowboarding an important re-boot for the genre.

“It has gone a bit ‘cold’ on the next-gen when it comes to snowboarding games,” confirms Brannelly.  “I put that down to a decrease in interest with extreme games in general over the last few years, but it’s offered Ubisoft the opening to strategically move into this field. We’ve applied some of the best developers in the world to making something fresh and innovative, using their experience with next-gen technology.

"In terms of Xbox 360 and PS3, SWSB uses the Assassin’s Creed engine. The Montreal dev team have created stunning open world mountains where the player is free to find the best runs, on and off the board, as well offering an amazing sense of vertigo and space which one experiences when snowboarding for real. It really is something to behold.”

Squeezing in plenty of features, the online multiplayer modes looks very impressive, allowing snowboard fanatics across the globe to compete with ease. “This is the icing on the cake really on next-gen,” continues Brannelly. “Being able to play online with 15 mates anywhere in the world and building your own persistent character style through an upgrade mechanic are great additions. This all takes place in an environment where the mountains are huge and completely open in a sandbox game type of way.”

The marketing campaign in place pulls in all the brands you might associate with snowboarding and will catch the attention of anyone who has been on a board. “Firstly we have partnerships with Oakley, Burton and Red Bull in the UK who are all in the game, and this is allowing us to leverage an audience within the snowboarding market,” says Brannelly.

“We will be working with Burton, in particular at Metro newspaper’s Surf and Ski show. And we were premium sponsor at this year’s FreeSports on Channel 4’s Freeze event, which is a winter sports and music festival at Battersea park. On top of that we have a huge TV spend running from launch in November through into December with specific creatives for Wii and next gen audiences; Nintendo are working with us on producing the Wii creative. We will support this with print and online across specialist and snowboarding lifestyle media.”

The first serious attempt at pushing a title like this on the next-gen, Ubisoft has ‘mountain peak hopes’ for the game. It’s going all out to push the message that this is a title that combines all the elements that made titles like Tony Hawks so successful. Shaun White Snowboarding looks more than exciting enough to attract both old and new gamers – and even completely redefine the winter sports genre.