1080° Snowboarding’s lead designer initially thought the game would be cancelled

Giles Goddard, the lead designer and programmer on 1080° Snowboarding, originally thought the game would be cancelled. He reflected on the N64 classic in a recent issue of Retro Gamer.

The N64 game was a fairly strong success for Nintendo thanks to a favorable critical reception and sales that crossed two million copies worldwide. However, it actually didn’t test well internally. Because of this, Goddard felt Nintendo would simply scrap the project. Had the company ended up moving forward, Goddard believed it would end up becoming “a complete flop”.

Goddard told the magazine:

“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.”

As for why 1080° Snowboarding did do well, Goddard thinks it comes down to “the controls and the physics. Because those are the things we spent the most time working on. A lot of games don’t get the same effort put into the little things like camera movements, or the tiny, subtle physics reactions.”

1080° Snowboarding would get a sequel, 1080° Avalanche, on the GameCube. Nintendo has not done anything with the series since.