OlliOlli 2: The greatest trick Roll7 ever pulled © Roll7

OlliOlli hardly needs any introduction anymore. Like Trials, the 2D skateboarding indie hit is synonymous with a return to what made hardcore games: simple mechanics that are very, very hard to master.

It was one of the few breakout hits on Sony's PS Vita , and has proved a hit on PC, PS4 and PS3 as well, with ports for Xbox One , Wii U and Nintendo 3DS on the way too. The game has already sold more than 500,000 copies worldwide, so of course there's a sequel on the way: OlliOlli 2 is headed to PS4 and Vita next year as a timed exclusive.

Not bad for a tiny team working out of an office on a residential road in New Cross, south-east London, but what you might not realise is how close OlliOlli came to never happening at all: the studio behind it very nearly missed the landing during a pitch meeting with Sony, as Roll 7 co-founder and director Simon Bennett told us this week.

"We went to Sony with a bunch of game prototypes – they were not interested in any of them. Tom [Another Roll7 director] literally kicked John Ribbins [Roll7 creative director] under the desk and was like 'Dude, just show him OlliOlliOlli,' as it was known at that point."

"It was literally at the back of the pile of things. John really didn't want to show it. 'You know it's nothing yet, it's just this thing where you jump.' So we showed it to Shahid Ahmad, the head honcho for anything indie at Sony, and he sat there and played it for about half an hour during the meeting, disengaged with any of the conversation, put it down, turned to us and said 'Right that it's. Let's do it. Let's make it for Vita, it's perfect.' He just trusted us to go out and make this game. We had no idea how we were going to go out and build for Vita, we'd never used any console hardware before anything like that, it was a big step for us."

Big step is an understatement. Roll7 initially emerged back in 2008 as part of a youth training set up, when the three directors worked with a team of young Londoners to create a computer game project about the dangers of knife crime called Dead Ends. Other 'socially responsible' gaming and digital projects followed, while Ribbins worked on his own game ideas in his spare time.

"We fell into doing marketing projects and film and weird online web apps, and really interesting creative stuff that we'd pitch and didn't know how to do and just made it happen. But then in 2012 we were like, ‘What on earth are we doing, what do we want to do?'"

So the team self-funded an iPhone game, Get Us To The Exit, a well received puzzle game, but the free-to-play business model was already booming on mobile by then, and it was hard to stand out, especially with a premium price tag. Bennett admits, "It took about a year... We got a little bit burnt on that."

But the shifting audience of mobile gaming also brought them to the conclusions that would birth OlliOlli. "We realised we make hardcore games for people who like that classic, retro, one more go kind of vibe. We were introduced to James Marsden from FuturLab [developer of hit Vita game Velocity 2X] in 2012 and that's when he introduced us to Sony."

"We shut all of our agency work down, all the marketing work, we got rid of all of our clients and were like 'Right this is it, we've got Sony on our case, let's put everything into it. If it all goes wrong at least we can say we tried and probably just about scrape something back together after us.'" Of course, it didn't. "The moment it was launched Sony were like 'Guys you've got gold here.'"

Pick up a controller (or a Vita) and the spartan appeal of OlliOlli is immediately obvious. You push to gain speed with your nameless skater, throw tricks with the sticks and tap X to land: muck it up and you don’t get any of the points. Fall over entirely and you have to start over. Roll7 cleverly keep you coming back for more by ramping up the difficulty level with each stage, and with its innovative Daily Grind mode – which lets players have just one go to set the highest score on a new spot each day.

"We just wanted a way of bringing people back to the game on a daily basis. We just really like the idea of being able to practise as much as you want and then only getting one chance, it really relates back to skateboarding. You see a run in a skateboarding video and you're like, 'That probably took 50 goes and a couple of broken ankles to get that right.' The Daily Grind is very much that."

You can already throw kickflips , hardflips, heelflips and nosebluntslides in the first OlliOlli, but for Bennett, a keen skateboarder in his youth, there was something missing, a serious hole that needed fixing. This time round, OlliOlli 2 lets you throw manuals , something the team could not work into the scoring system in time for the first game.

"In OlliOlli making a manual work, landing basically in a wheelie, is not tough technically but to actually integrate that in a meaningful way into the combo system that was so tight, without a lot of thought, you could have broken everything," Bennett says. "It has taken us about six months of prototyping, arguing, planning, replanning, reworking and realising very recently that the score scenario we had for how manuals work was broken because you could hop manuals and build your combo up by doing that." Now, "manuals chain your combo together from section to section… they’re worth more the further you go, they’re like grinds." Other tricks debuting in OlliOlli 2 include double kickflips, double heelflips, double laserflips, 720 flips, kickflip underflips and shuvit lateflips, which you can see in action in the exclusive video below.

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It's not just about new tricks this time around however. OlliOlli 2 features newer, more detailed artwork as well as a film-set background, letting the team create levels around Wild West and Temple of Doom style scenarios. The level layout has changed too.

"For me my biggest want for the game was that we had curved surfaces and ramps," says Bennett. "In OlliOlli you're only ever going down. I wanted us to be able to go up, to do really interesting transition stuff. What we've tried to do is bring that into this. You can jump up like that and then land, and build up speed and then use that speed to go into another section."

Sadly, a publicly available level editor isn't on the cards, at least not this time: maintaining that would be too much of a struggle for a team of less than a dozen.

"It's something that we thought about, but with all the things that we wanted to do a level editor would have opened up a whole load of technical challenges that, as a small indie studio, we're not necessarily capable of, but I guess never say never for the future. Just how you deal with all that server space, it becomes an ongoing, very different project."

OlliOlli 2 © Roll7

There is however, old school, splitscreen multiplayer , something which Bennett says never even occurred to the team during the making of the first game. "We were playing Towerfall, all these local multiplayer games – and we realised how cool it would be if we could play against each other in races, score attack challenges that are related to time, that are related to an overall score challenge."

"I'll be totally honest, I was really nervous that splitscreen wouldn't work, it wouldn't be that interesting. You know someone's always going to be better, it's not actually going to be that good. It's our game, I'm going to say it's good, but it is awesome."

"You've got this big framework, you can pick any level, any spot, any permutation of four different ways to play the game and four of you just sit around, shouting at each other either. It's really fun, it really is. We've had to really iterate on it and work out how we signpost all the information about how everyone is doing in relation to everyone else. There's so much going on in the game, but we've done a really good job of that."

Splitscreen is just another reason why you won't be seeing OlliOlli on mobiles anytime soon, despite Roll7's background in iPhone game development.

"It's not in our current plans... Not with a control system like this. The original prototype was for a mobile: it was instead of actually rotating for tricks it was just sort of a direction you swipe, which I think now would feel a bit odd." Still, as Roll7's curious history shows, you never quite know what's going to happen next.