KUDO: Jonny Moseley Mad Trix is a skiing game for the PS2. But this is skiing unlike it has ever been done in any video game before and much different than even what you probably think of as skiing in your own mind. All the skiing games that have been done before were all alpine, downhill games. There are no guys in tight jumpsuits skiing through gates in this game. Mad Trix is a new school, trick-based skiing game. It is much more like skateboarding on skis than the skiing that you would traditionally think of. It is all about the grinds, the grabs, and hucking mistys and rodeos. We really wanted to do a freeskiing game because freeskiing is the extreme sport that really is just starting to take off. It is really interesting to see how skiing and snow boarding have worked together over the years. Several years ago, skiing was the more dominant snow sport. You would go out on the slopes and see everybody from 5 year old kids to 50 year old businessmen skiing. The people who wanted to do something more creative and innovative gravitated towards snow boarding. But now, it really is the opposite. Snowboarding is the more prevalent sport. Go out on the slopes now, and all the 5 year old kids and 50 year old businessmen are boarding. The people who want to do something more innovative and creative are heading to freeskiing. Since you have two skis in skiing, the amount of grabs and tricks you can do are much larger that what you can do in snowboarding. All of the real innovation in the snow sports industries is now happening in freeskiing.

KUDO: It was much more of a mutual agreement based on a good fit for Moseley and for our company. The reason we wanted to work with Jonny Moseley is because he is not only an Olympic Gold Medalist, but he is one of the leading skiers in the current freeskiing movement. Moseley won a gold medal in the ’98 Olympics for Freestyle Moguls. He was one of the first skiers to start introducing these freeskiing-based tricks into the more formal competitions like the Olympics. He won the gold by hucking a sick 360 Mute grab when nobody else was doing those kinds of tricks. He blew people away. Ever since then, he has been using his celebrity status to better educate people as to what is really going on in skiing these days. He is one of the main people taking freeskiing tricks and getting them accepted in more of the main stream skiing competitions. For example, his signature move, the Dinner Roll, is now a trick recognized by the Olympic Competition Committee. He works tirelessly to bring freeskiing more to the forefront of the skiing industry. Besides his skiing ability, he also is an avid gamer. He has his own PS2 and has been instrumental to the design of the game not only from a freeskier point of view, but from a gamer point of view as well. There is no other person we would rather have worked with. Plus, Moseley came to the office, met with our development team, checked out all the games we had worked on before, and hopefully was impressed with our knowledge of his sport and the quality of the games we have made. I would like to think he was as impressed with us as we are with him. :)

KUDO: Besides Jonny Moseley, we have three of the other top freeskiers in the world as characters in the game. Tanner Hall, who is a 17 year old up and comer, did a lot of the motion capture work for us. Tanner won a Gold Medal at the X Games this year and is definitely one of the bright young stars of the sport. Evan Raps (Silver Medal at the X Games) is known throughout freeskiing as one of the top trick experts in the sport. We also have Vincent Dorion, the man who pioneered skiing switch, and is famous for his underflip. Including Moseley, we have the top 4 freeskiers in the sport as characters in the game. It has been great to work with these guys.

KUDO: Again, this is not like skiing games that have been seen before. All the other skiing games have been downhill racing or other alpine events. Jonny Moseley Mad Trix is nothing like those types of games. It is all new school jibbing and tricks. It truly is a lot more like skateboarding on skis than it is like other skiing games out there today. The game is totally trick based. You need to learn how to use anything and everything to huck tricks off. Instead of skiing between gates, you will be hucking mistys and rodeos off 500ft cliffs. Instead of racing down the hill as fast as you can, you will be looking for every rail to grind on and every halfpipe to work for a big trick score. This really is not a skiing game, it is a freeskiing game. If anything, the gameplay is a lot more like Tony Hawk than any ski game out there.

KUDO: Actually, that was one of the big thrills of working on this game. One of the other designers and I both have been following freeskiing for awhile now, watching a bunch of movies and checking out the ski mags. We were just checking it out because the people in the sport were doing such amazing things. But we were nowhere near prepared for the amount of research we had to do for this game. One thing that is really important to the development team is making the game as true to the sport of freeskiing as possible. In making this game, we did nothing but research for the first 6 months to make sure the design team fully understood not only the sport of freeskiing, but also the lifestyle that went along with it. We watched hundreds of hours of freeskiing videos and have poured through hundreds of ski magazines like Freeskier and Freeze. And while doing all this research gave us a pretty good understanding of the sport and the people in it, nothing has been as helpful as hanging out with the freeskiers themselves. It is interesting, since the sport is so creative, most of what the freeskiers do on the slopes are things they make up on the fly. That is what the sport is all about, unbridled creativity and pushing the envelope. So if you sit down with a freeskier like Tanner Hall or Evan Raps and ask them what we should put in the game, you won’t get that many great answers. But if you follow them around on the slopes for a bit, you get an endless amount of cool things to work into the gameplay.

As part of our research for the game, we spent two weeks living up in Tahoe with a house full of freeskiers, hanging out with them and getting an up close tour of what Freeskiing is all about. Near where we were staying, there was a train station. The train ran very infrequently and usually late at night. Having been caught behind the trains while driving occasionally, I can tell you the trains were extremely long. Well, one night in the wee hours, after an extended session of partying, one of the guys stood up and started yelling “Train Jump! Train Jump! Train Jump!”. Soon, everyone in the room was chanting it. Our development people obviously had no idea what the hell was going on, but soon people were running around in a frenzy grabbing their ski equipment.

We trudged up the hill, which was some task in the condition we were in, and everybody starting putting equipment on. I finally caught my breath enough to ask what the heck was going on. To my amazement, the answer was “The train is coming. We’re gonna jump it. We have wanted to do this all season.” I was simply amazed. There were no kickers of any kind nearby so I had no idea how they planned to get any air. As the train rumbled by, one of our freeskiing companions started heading down the hill. Weaving in and out of trees, I finally understood what he was going to use as a ramp. The train station was pretty small, but it had an extremely nice, very ramp looking roof. Since it had snowed so much, you could ski right from the snow on the ground, up the snow on the roof, and go flying over the train tracks. Soon, each of our companions were whipping down the hill, hucking themselves off the train station roof, jumping over the train, and doing some of the sickest aerial maneuvers you have ever seen. And landing them. Unbelievable!!!

Back at the house, our hosts explained that they had never done that before but had always wanted to. Just seemed like the right time to give it a go. That kind of crazy / creative approach to skiing is what freeskiing is all about. They are pushing trick based snow sports to the limit with everything and anything being part of the run. That is the spirit and type of gameplay we have captured in Jonny Moseley Mad Trix.

KUDO: We have two different types of levels in the game, Slopestyle and Big Mountain levels. Slopestyle levels are all tournament based courses with man made sculpted kickers and pre-placed rails. But we put the Slopestyle courses in fantastical environments like San Francisco where you can get up on the Golden Gate Bridge and grind down the cables. Or Washington DC where you can huck tricks off the Capitol Building. We also have a level in the ruins of Machu Picchu. We have built the levels around places that Jonny Moseley has always wanted to ski, but has never been able to. Slopestyle courses are all tournament based, with the player competing against other skiers' trick scores for medals (Gold, Silver, and Bronze). As you win more medals and tournaments, you gain sponsors. The sponsors give you new equipment and outfits that improve your skier’s abilities.

If you win enough medals, and gain enough sponsors and fame, you get invited to star in your own ski movie in Big Mountain mode. In Big Mountain mode, you get dropped off at the top of actual mountains by a helicopter and have to ski your way down hucking yourself off 200ft cliffs and traveling at speeds in excess of 100mph. Big Mountain courses consist of all naturally formed tricks opportunities and hazards. Unlike the man made sculpted courses of Slopestyle mode, you are doing jumps off cliffs and grinding on fallen trees instead of rails. We also through in some extra hazards like avalanches you can trigger. A big wave of snow comes up from behind you and tries to sweep you down the mountain. You can either try and get out of the way, outrun the avalanche, or if you can get on top of the wave of snow, you can ride it down the mountain like a snow surfer.

In Big Mountain mode, you are not trying to beat the trick scores of other skiers or competing for medals. There is one trick score you need to beat to complete the level. If you beat the trick score, your run is replayed for you in a ski movie format. We are working with an actual ski movie company to make sure the movie presentation is exactly like the ski movies being made in real life.

KUDO: This is something that is of prime importance to the development team, making sure the skiers and the tricks are as authentic and true to freeskiing as possible. It really has been great, all of the skiers have worked really hard on the game in a variety of aspects. First of all, all the trick and skiing animation you see in the game is done with motion capture data that we got using Jonny Moseley and Tanner Hall. They worked tirelessly for 4 straight days doing everything from the grabs and in air tricks, to the basic ski animations. This was done early on in the project. Since then, Moseley himself comes to the office twice a month to give us feedback on the animations and on the gameplay. Plus, Evan Raps, Tanner Hall, and Vincent Dorion all have come down to the office at different times to give their input as well. The game development never goes more than a week or two without one of the freeskiers coming down to the office and going through the game with a fine toothed comb. I have been really impressed with how hard these guys have worked on the game. They give us feedback on tricks, course layout, outfits on the skiers, animations, how different terrain surfaces affect a skier, etc. The really cool thing about working with these guys is that all of them have PS2's, all of them are gamers, and they really understand not only how to make a good freeskiing game, but how to make a fun game for non-freeskier people to play as well.

KUDO: The tough part about choosing the right music for the game was not just finding the right bands, but finding music that really adds to the gameplay. More than any other game I have worked on, the music really is an instrumental part of the gameplay. While skiing the levels, it is really important to find your line down the course and get a good trick rhythm going. It is critical that the rhythm of the music matches the trick rhythm of the course or it is kind of disjointing. By making sure the music matches the levels they are played on, you can really help the player find a good trick rhythm by letting them ski to the rhythm of the music. The game soundtrack features a good mix of hip hop, thrash rock, and some more techno oriented songs. We have some really great bands like Saliva and Mad Capsule Markets. In fact, a record company has already secured the rights to releasing a CD soundtrack of the game music completely separate from the game!

KUDO: Well, as everybody knows, next to game developers, freeskiers are probably the biggest chick magnets on the face of the planet. Trust me, more than one girl has turned to jelly at the sight of Tanner Hall throwing a Dspin 9. Besides just the skiing part of freeskiing, we really wanted to capture a lot of the freeskiers lifestyle and culture in the game as well. It really is an amazingly fun culture to exist in. The attitude of the freeskiers themselves is fun, wild, creative, and uninhibited whether they are skiing or at a party with the babes. Much of this is captured in the game. For instance, a big part of freeskiing is competing in the tournaments to gain sponsors and fame. If you can get enough recognition in the tournaments, you get invited to star in your own ski movie in Big Mountain mode. This is how it works in the game as well. Plus, as all freeskiers know, the better you do on the slopes, the better you do with the babes!!!

KUDO: The most fun part for sure is all the people I have gotten to meet in the freeskiing community. It has been such a blast. Getting to go skiing and partying with these guys has been some of the most fun times I have had in game development. Everybody has been so friendly towards us and helpful to the game. The generosity of everybody in the freeskiing community has been amazing. Plus, I am so star struck just to be able to hang out with these people. I mean, these are guys who we watched in movies and saw in magazines for the first 6 months of our research and then suddenly we are hanging out with them on the slopes or in our office. I could not have been any more excited had I been hanging out with Cindy Crawford. I think sometimes the freeskiers get kind of weirded out by my groupie like admiration. I am always getting them to sign things and taking their picture. It is kind of funny.

The toughest part of working on the game has been the damage my body has taken trying to keep up with people like Jonny Moseley out on the slopes.

Now I can ski pretty well, but let’s face it…I am no Jonny Moseley. For instance, I got the chance to ski with Moseley in Whistler this year, up on the top of the mountain on the glacier (the only place on the mountain with snow). It took two bus rides and three chair lifts to get there. The only way to get to the terrain park from the last chair lift was to ski down a very narrow, bumpy, windy path. A narrow, bumpy, windy path with sheer drop off on either side that scared the crap out of me. I was hoping there was another way down but Moseley just took off and headed down the path leaving the camera crew and I there wetting our pants. Not wanting to look like a game developer on skis, I had little or no choice but to head down the path and try and look dope doing it. Nothing looks more “dope” than rolling past Gold Medalist skier Jonny Moseley, tumbling head over heels, down a 500ft slope. All saved on film for posterity. It sure was a nice surprise to see this video played at our company meeting so all my co-workers could laugh at me. But by the end of the two days, I was flying off small kickers, attacking rails (although somewhat unsuccessfully), and even starting to work the half pipe. Not bad for an old man.

KUDO: More great games and hopefully, more fun interviews on PlayStation Illustrated!!!

KUDO: It really is my pleasure. I love the site and am psyched to get a chance to do an interview and talk about the game. I have sunk nearly two years of my life into this title. Pick it up when it comes out. It really will be worth the money.