Issue 107 July 2010 free
LEE YANKOU B eh i n d The C ur t a i n
Geoff Strelow i n t er v i ew
EA Skate 3
Haslam / Reynolds / DMODW L i z ar d K i n g / A p p l e yar d The Skate Bro Reality Show
with
Joey Williams & Travis Stenger Identity Chico Brenes /// Five Spot Mike Mo /// Shoe Vault DC Danny Way /// Sound Check Public Enemy
Concept Art
Wireframe Geometry
Shaded Geometry
Textured Geometry
Final In-Game Art with Lighting
Colin McKay in the Skate 3 intro reel.
Quest for a Million: Behind-the-scenes of words
Kelly Litzenberger
EA’s
Skateboarding’s long video game history began in late 1986 with Atari’s 720˚, and was quickly followed by the 1987 classic, Skate Or Die! – the first title that Electronic Arts ever developed in-house. In the new millenium, EA once again showed interested in making a skateboard game, and early work on the award-winning Skate series began in 2004 (three years prior to the release of Skate 1). By May 2010 the genre climaxed with the full version of Skate 3; the free preview demo was downloaded over a million times within the first week of its April release on the Xbox 360 and PS3 networks. The in-game objective of Skate 3 is simple – sell a million skateboards. You’ve done it all in the past two games by becoming a Pro, becoming Skater Of The Year, and subsequently becoming a legend. What’s left is starting your own company. As Skate 3 Associate Producer Chris “Cuz” Parry admits, “If you don’t think that’s real, take a look at the industry.” The game’s career mode is all about creating a team and building your brand. While online you can take full advantage of engaging features like co-op play, joining a team, and choosing to be competitive or just plain creative. You can be social with online play, or you can stay offline and skate solo. Basically, anything goes in-game. Although Skate 3 takes place in the fictional city of Port
Skate 3 Carverton, there’s a very real sentiment behind the name. The city honours Vancouver skateboard legend “Carver Don” Hartley, who passed away in 2009. Port Carverton features an extensive skateable memorial park, Hartley Stadium, and plaques throughout the city that forever immortalize Carver Don in skateboarding’s digital history. Added to the roster this time around are Andrew Reynolds, Josh Kalis, Benny Fairfax, Joey Brezinski, Dan Drehobl, Lizard King, Jason Lee, and the Barrier Kult’s own Deer Man Of Dark Woods. The game’s Pro list now includes 30 of skateboarding’s best along with celebrity skate photographers Atiba Jefferson, Michael Burnett and Giovanni Reda. “We wanted Skate to appeal to everybody,” Cuz mentions. “From Danny Way to Mike Carroll, there’s a lot of diversity. We never really did go poaching [Pros] from other games because we thought: ‘Well, they’re already getting paycheques, so these other guys should get a cheque.’ Looking at it, the more skaters that get paid, the better.” Gamers willing to try their hand at the Skate series for the first time have to break old habits. While the “Flick-it” control scheme is revolutionary, it also has a deep learning curve – something that’s been addressed in the new game. Concrete skateboarding
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mapstone
CHRIS HASLAM . switch f/s hurricane When I saw [Skate 1] for the first time it was basically just a bunch of generic shapes and a dude running around. I had no idea what was happening. Motion capture took a few days. I’ve done a few mo-cap sessions for different projects – same spandex suits, same little balls that they don’t want to you to wreck [laughs]. Some kid made of my UBF 2 part [using Skate 2]. It’s funny when the darkslide thing happens and the dude just summersaults or something [laughs].
they’ve done with the tools we’ve given them, I’m pretty confident we don’t have to make another game for a couple years.” In every Skate release, hardcore gamers have found ways to be inventive when it comes to discovering and exploiting work-arounds or unintentional glitches they may come across – something that isn’t much different than the DIY nature of skateboarding in the real world. A great example of this is the “long pipe” found in the Object Dropper. By simply leaning this two-storey pole against a building, it allows you walk up it and gain access to roof gaps and otherwise inaccessible areas the programmers never intended. “As much as our QA [Quality Assurance] team is awesome, our game is made to inherently cause QA nightmares because there are no rules,” Cuz explains. “We have a replay editor going all the time, so anytime somebody ‘breaks the game’ we’re all going to see it on YouTube. We’ve always embraced that.” EA has dominated skateboard video games with their Skate franchise over the years, and this latest release once again stands as the highest sticker on the vert wall – a one-in-a-million benchmark that competing developers must strive to top.
judah oakes
“With Skate 1 and Skate 2 we kind of took the approach of skaters,” Cuz explains. “When you get a skateboard, you have to figure it out on your own. The game is challenging and maybe it was turning people off. [In Skate 3] we wanted to have fun with ‘skate. School’ and build another environment you could skate. This was our attempt to make it a friendlier experience, and Jason Lee as ‘Coach Frank’ is funny. We’ll never be able to release it, but the outtakes from his recording session are the best X-rated audio we’ve ever had.” Skate 3 now features three levels of play: easy, classic and hardcore – a new mode that turns down the in-game physics and most notably allows for a more realistic pop out of ledge tricks. Cuz points out Skate 3’s upgraded Object Dropper as his favourite carryover feature: “It lets you edit the world on the fly, and it’s easy. It will end up giving you a lot more creativity and room to explore.” The new “skate.Parks” feature will prove to extend the game far beyond Port Carverton’s already-generous square footage, since you can create, share, download and edit up to 100 parks at any given time. According to Cuz: “You’re creating a whole new game if you think about it in terms of volume. Given the community’s track record of what
DEER MAN OF DARK WOODS . Layback grind I got involved with Skate 3 for the further unnatural spreading of plague.
Concrete skateboarding
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andrew mapstone
Quest for a Million: Behind-the-scenes of
EA’s
Skate 3
MARK APPLEYARD . Kickflip Skateboarding video games are awesome, especially if you’re in one. I’m not a big video game person, but playing Skate is good when you’re too sore. I definitely play my own character, duh. It trips me out every time. I love it. I’m in a video game – that’ll earn me some street cred with my kids…when I have kids. Niiice.
joey shigeo
LIZARD KING . Dump Truck When EA called me, I was trippin’. That is some crazy shit, man! Doing the voice-over shit was super fun – it’s crazy being in a room and being told different shit that’s happening, and what you would say to the person playing. Playing and hearing yourself is sick! My friends back home call and tell me they’re playing me [laughs]. Thanks to everyone over there at Skate that made it happen. Mad love. Concrete skateboarding
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joe hammeke
Andrew Reynolds . frontside flip Hell yeah! I played [the Skate series] before they asked me to be in Skate 3. It gets more kids exposed to the coolest thing in the world. It’s very important that the people behind it are passionate about skateboarding. When ‘The Man’ gets involved, it ruins everything.
Danny Way
John Cardiel
Jason Dill
Eric Koston
Andrew Reynolds
Lizard King, Chris Haslam and Joey Brezinski on location in Portland, OR.
Skate 3 intro reel The five-minute intro movies to each Skate game have somewhat become cult classics on the ‘Net since the first one dropped in 2007. Each movie provides the foundation to the story that unfolds in-game, and stars a majority of the featured Pros. “I pretty much see who’s available, and who’s not,” explains Deran Chung, Senior Video Editor and Producer for Skate 3. “I put more emphasis on the new guys – Drehobl, Lizard King, Reynolds and everybody. It’s just about casting dudes into roles that you know they’re going to shine in. Danny [Way] always leads the action. I always know that [Mike] Carroll’s going to be the dick at the end, ‘cause he plays that so good.” Not surprisingly, Chris Haslam is cast as a Sasquatch in the woods, which was a change from the first two intro reels when he was cast…well, gay. And that didn’t seem to bother him either: “I thought the gay stuff was funny, man. I kind of wanted to keep it going for this third one,” Haslam mentions. “They made the [Sasquatch] costume beforehand, and I wore it to the shoot. Everyone on the freeway was probably pretty pumped to see me sitting shotgun [laughs].”
As you can imagine, not everything is going to go smoothly when organizing a filming mission with 30 skaters. Deran Chung recalls the experience: “The first Portland trip was before the other stuff, because Lizard and Haslam were both going on tour. It was just a little shoot with Lizard, Joey [Brezinski] and Haslam – I wanted to make sure those dudes were in it. The major shoot happened a month later. We went back to Oregon, to the lumberyard, for the tree-cuttingdown stuff, and then we flew to LA for another two days. We only had one day at the lumberyard. Danny has to be the one who chops the tree down; if he’s not there to do it, we’re fucked. He ended up missing three flights, losing his keys, falling and hurting himself, then showing up. He was supposed to be on set at 6am, and he got there at 1:30 or 2pm. Then when we were doing Carroll and Kalis’ scene, we straight barged the Pasadena Convention Centre. We didn’t have permits, and I was losing it because I thought we were just going to get shut down in a second. It was a Saturday and security would come up and ask, ‘What are you guys doing?’ We’d reply, ‘Oh, we’re shooting a school project.’” Concrete skateboarding
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