SSX and SSX Tricky are widely accepted by anybody who played them on the PlayStation 2 back in the day, as not only the best snowboarding games ever made but up there with the best sports titles we have ever seen.
Under EA Sports’ Big offshoot, which featured larger-than-life sports games, rather than stuffy, straight-down-the-middle licenses such as FIFA and PGA Tour, SSX and its sequel featuring a sample from Run DMC’s ‘It’s Tricky’ , hark back to a time when games could just be fun. No item shop was required and you could play as your favorite character without spending two hours dressing them up in different licensed gear.
There have been a couple more SSX games, including SSX3, and a reboot of the franchise in 2012 which has actually turned out to be the last game in the series.
Now it seems plans for the spiritual successor to SSX have been canned. Development studio Supernatural, which was founded in 2020 by SSX creators Larry LaPierre and Steve Rechtschaffner had been working on something codenamed Project Gravity since 2021, talked about it opening in an interview with Laptop, then gone quiet after securing a major publishing deal.
This deal turns out to be with 2K who have now walked away from the project according to IGN.
Rechtschaffner had said that the game would be a free-to-play live-service snowboarding game that took the arcade and fun style gameplay that SSX is known for and added creative elements such as course building.
Many would have been happy with a normal game without all the bells and whistles, but now it looks like neither is destined to be.
EA continues to sit on the SSX IP with nothing in the pipeline and it may be that we have now lost the best chance of returning to something like the slopes of one of the best games of its kind ever.
Featured Image: EA Sports
