Shaun Palmer’s Pro Snowboarder: Think You Can Ride Like Me?
Game #38: Shaun Palmer’s Pro Snowboarder, Dearsoft, 2001
If you’ve ever spent time in a used game store, you’ve seen a copy of Shaun Palmer’s Pro Snowboarder. You may not remember seeing it, but you did. Perhaps you did notice, and perhaps you said to yourself, “wait, there’s a Tony-Hawk-style snowboarding game? And it’s not named after Shaun White?”
When SPPS came out, Shaun White was 15 years old. He still makes an appearance in this game, but his avatar is about 3 feet tall and has the voice of a young Anikin Skywalker.
Palmer was Snowboarding’s biggest name in those days. This was at a time when you were more likely to catch Snowboarding on the X Games than at the Olympics. Snowboarding was a sport for tattooed Henry Rollins impersonators, not charming youngsters with bright smiles and endearingly unkempt hair. And Palmer embodied this spirit to the fullest.
Learning about Palmer’s life, I see shades of Bam Margera, someone who now somberly reflects on how early fame arrested his personal growth. After setting his sights on the sport of mountain biking, Palmer became notorious for showing up to races with his naked his body splayed against the front windshield of his tour bus. After coming second place in a mountain-biking championship, he threw his goggles to the ground in frustration. He was the first in the sport to trade in cycling gear for the far-more badass motorcross attire, and routinely passed on sponsorship deals offering upwards of 100k dollars if the deal wasn’t just so.
We see this reflected in SPPS in a number of ways, one of them being Palmer’s in-game portrait.
Okay, how about one normal one, and one silly one? Oh, we’re just gonna stick with the snide apathy? Okay.
As I write this, the Winter Olympics are ongoing. Something that makes these Olympics different for me is that I’ve recently come to understand how costly the upper-echelons of success can be. In the Netflix documentary, Jim and Andy, Jim Carry says: “You do whatever you need to do to look like a winner... At some point, when you create yourself to make it, you’re going to have to either let that creation go and take a chance on being loved or hated for who you really are, or you’re gonna have to kill who you really are, and fall into your grave grasping onto a character that you never were.”
This documentary, along with reading about countless other creators, athletes, inventors and entrepreneurs has completely changed the way I look at successful people. When I see someone brandishing a gold medal, to some degree I still see fortune and genius and talent and circumstance just like I always did. But more than that, I see sacrifice. And not just time and relationships, but little chunks of oneself that must be cleaved off like flecks of diamond, leaving behind a rock that is smaller, battle-scarred, but outwardly prettier.
Shaun Palmer is arguably the reason you and I have heard of snowboarding. To the burgeoning in-crowd of the infant sport, he was snowboarding. When flashy moves fell out of favor for technical precision and riders were suddenly expected to be role-models rather than rebels, the Shaun Palmers of the world were relegated to the X-Games, with professional and Olympic snowboarding veering off in a cleaner, more formal direction.
And I’ll admit that I’m glad it did, because I’m a prude and a coward. I don’t want my Olympic gold-medalists to be dangerous bad boys. I want ginger-headed muppets who will charm the pants off the world once every four years and then disappear so I don’t have to worry about what flecks of them got sheared off on their way to the top. I want athletes whose character flaws are easily brushed over in a 1 minute puff piece. I want athletes that help me feel like watching snowboarding counts as a legitimate interest in sports, not my way of clinging to my adolescent video-game fantasies.
Oh, right, the game.
Shaun Palmer’s Pro Snowboarder essentially transplants the core ideas of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater to snowboarding. It incorporates elements of many snowboarding disciplines, including half-pipe, slopestyle, downhill, and big air. Grab and grind tricks are similar, but flip tricks are a complete curve ball, because it’s the rider’s body, rather than the board, that does the flipping. Landing also takes some getting used to, especially with both ramps, and quarter/half-pipes present. Because the levels are strictly down hill and backtracking requires hitting special targets to teleport back up, missing a pickup or failing to land a trick can be a death sentence for a run. Resetting is frequent.
Essentially, SPPS’s biggest flaw is that it’s snowboarding’s answer to the earlier Tony Hawk games, feeling a bit out-of-date. And in a way it was probably always doomed to be. Snowboarding is far more different from skateboarding than it first seems. Bringing SPPS to life required a drastic rework of the object control code that governs the rider.
The code that dictates what the player character can and cannot do is often called a “character controller.” Before attempting to script a character controller myself, I could never have imagined how disruptive it can be to make even small changes to its behavior. A character controller in a game like SPPS or Sly Cooper or Mario in Mario Odyssey has to account for a dizzying number of states (standing on the ground, walking, in the air after falling, in the air after jumping, clinging to a ledge, running, changing direction while mid-air, using one of several moves while on the ground, while in the air, while running, while using another move, on and on and on).
Not only does changing one of these states usually have implications for the other states, especially those that are not exclusive but can exist simultaneously, (one can be attacking while running in Sly Cooper for instance) but it also has implications for many other systems, including NPC AI, level design, special mechanics, and so-on.
What this means is that a lot of the lessons that the designers learned over the course of the first four Tony Hawk games rarely applied because most of them were specific to the particulars of the Tony Hawk character controller. Things like how dense to make the levels, balancing challenges, making things relatively easy to find, etc. SPPS had to go back to square one on a lot of these things.
The result was not bad per se, it’s just not what fans of Activision’s “action sports” games had come to expect. If SPPS had come out just a couple years earlier, it would have been a huge success. But by the time it came out, its mechanical similarities to the Tony Hawk games were arguably a deficit, because they create an expectation for a similar level of mechanical polish.
So yeah, the game’s difficulty is far above what followers of the THPS series were used to at that point. And the goal system wasn’t a perfect fit with the level design, and the starting stats were probably too low and the scoring system needed some work, and the sound implementation has a couple kinks in it. But that’s nothing that should be too damning of the game were it not for the expectations set by it’s older cousins.
I love games like this. They’re focused and honest. It promises snowboarding and then delivers.









