1080° Snowboarding lead dev thought the game would either be cancelled or flop
1080° Snowboarding might not be the most well-known title from Nintendo, but it certainly found an audience when it released for the N64 1998. In fact, the original outing did well enough to warrant a GameCube sequel, 1080° Avalanche. All of this was quite a surprise to 1080° Snowboarding’s lead designer, who didn’t see a bright future for the game at all.
In an interview with Retro Gamer Magazine, lead designer Giles Goddard revealed that he originally thought the game might not even release due to a low internal testing score, but even if it did make it to the public, he thought it would be a flop.
“It got a really low score in the internal Nintendo tests, anything under a six is bad and they don’t usually release the game. I just thought it was going to be a complete flop. But it goes to show that even Nintendo doesn’t know what games are going to sell. I was surprised that they actually didn’t drop it because it didn’t really cost them that much to make it and it wasn’t adding to any of their franchises at the time.”
[Giles Goddard, lead designer]
1080° Avalanche went on to sell roughly 1.25 million units worldwide, proving that it was quite the opposite of a flop. If you’ve never had the chance to play this unique snowboarding game, you can look forward to it joining the Switch Online Expansion Pack sometime in the near future.
