Hello everyone,
Thanks for your support since our announcement last week. We appreciate each person who’s been riding with us and we can’t wait to bring Skate City to Steam. Skateboarding is a sport close to our hearts and today we would like to share a little about this background and the development of Skate City.
For Snowman founders Ryan Cash and Jordan Rosenberg, skateboarding was a big part of their childhood. In fact, Ryan and Jordan have been friends since they were kids, and their love of skateboarding began while they were living across the street from one another.
As Ryan explains:
"We started skateboarding, I don’t know, when we were probably 10-years-old or so. We were huge into it. We would go outside of my house and wax our curb and borrow my dad’s Sony camcorder for home footage. [...] We skateboarded every free minute we and some of the old school skate videos like Misled Youth, for example. When Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater came out, Jordan and I would play that all day long. We’d have sleepovers and be up until like six in the morning."
Although he didn't grow up on the same street as Ryan and Jordan, the team's Producer, Andrew Schimmel, also fell in love with skating at a young age:
"That was all my friends and I were concerned about — as soon as you get out at recess you grab your board. At lunch, after school, we tried to be learning new tricks every day and we kind of fell in love with that zone you fall into when you’re out in the city and you’re exploring and trying to push yourself to learn a new skill. The second you land a new trick, that’s such a rewarding feeling. So we wanted to capture some of that in the game."
But how did this childhood interest lead to a collaboration between Oslo-based development team, Agens, and Toronto-based Snowman?
The project was initiated by Daniel Zeller from Agens. While working on a very early version of the game, Daniel reached out to Ryan to ask some questions about the shaders being used in *Alto's Adventure*. As Ryan explains, this exchange was the spark that began the collaboration:
"I talked to our team and answered his question and then kind of kept this conversation going [...] this lightbulb went off where I was like, "Maybe we can help you make this game a little bit better with any of our expertise and the things we learned making *Alto’s Adventure*, and then also help you guys market it and things like that." ...The fact that we’d always wanted to make a skate game, and that if we had gone down the route of making a skate game, we would have wanted to do something that very much focuses on the art of skateboarding rather than the olympic or extreme sport side of things . So I floated that out as an idea and they were really stoked on that, so we kind of continued that conversation and that ended up leading to us deciding to team up and work on the game together."
A few years, and a lot of hard work later, you've got Skate City.
These quotes are from an excellent interview conducted by Blake Hester with Ryan and Andrew. You can check out the full article on Polygon: https://www.polygon.com/features/2018/12/31/18150672/skate-city-mobile-game-snowman-altos-adventure
What's your history with skateboarding? Head over to the #skate-city channel of our Discord server and share your story: discord.gg/snowman.
Thanks for reading and until next time!
- the Skate City team