7 items
"TEN-EIGHTY!" — the grunted title call said it all. Nintendo's own N64 snowboarding game played it straight: weighty, physics-driven boards, board-scraping sound design, and a namesake 1080-degree spin so hard it took nine distinct actions to land. You spent whole evenings just trying to beat the rival rider in Match Race.
This Xbox launch title did something radical: instead of following preset race tracks, you could pick any line down a whole mountain. The gimmick was fame—impress photographers and film crews, land sponsorships, and become a media sensation. Plus, the hard drive let you load your own music onto the console, a showstopper feature in 2001.
The 1999 Disney Channel movie about a 13-year-old Hawaiian surfer whose family moves to Vermont, where the mountain is split between rich private-school skiers and public-school snowboarders. He picks the snowboarders. Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa plays his grandfather, the surf legend of the title.
The red-haired "Flying Tomato" who won Olympic halfpipe gold in Turin in 2006, won again in Vancouver in 2010 with a victory-lap Double McTwist 1260, and piled up X Games medals in between. He had his own Ubisoft video games too.
Mario Kart on snow, basically — and that was the whole charm. Big-headed cartoon kids raced down the mountain pelting each other with weapons and items, then rode the ski lift back up mid-race while rivals took potshots at the line. Atlus's goofy N64 racer was the loud, chaotic flip side of 1080° Snowboarding.
IT'S TRICKY! The snowboarding game that traded realism for backflipping off a glacier while Run-DMC loops in your skull. Uber Tricks, a celebrity voice cast, and the loudest announcer in video games — winter sports as a Saturday-morning cartoon.
ESPN's made-for-TV Olympics of skateboarding, BMX, motocross, and snowboarding. It started as the Extreme Games in Rhode Island in 1995, got its one-letter name in 1996, and became the place where Tony Hawk landed the 900 and Travis Pastrana the double backflip.