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The approach is reminiscent of how EA’s Skate was a more realistic depiction of skateboarding as opposed to the Tony Hawk games. Garcin agrees with that comparison.

“Yeah, pretty much. That’s a really good description,” he said.

It’s also exactly what McMorris told the team he wanted during early discussions.

“He was like, ‘It should totally be like the Skate of snowboarding’,” said Garcin.

Infinite Air won’t feature the same score attack system seen in most extreme sports games.

“We try to use the same scoring system they use in real life. So if you do a slope style run, you get marked out of 100 the same way,” said Garcin.

The game uses a trick detection system that not only sees what moves a player does, but evaluates how well they pulled them off. It can tell if they landed a trick cleanly, or were clumsily flailing around in the air.

“The same factors that the judges in real life use, we use those to analyze your performance,” said Garcin.

To ensure those tricks looked real, the developers recorded motion capture performances of McMorris. Doing this on a real hill with snow probably wasn’t feasible, so an indoor ramp was constructed with plastic sheathing that McMorris’ snowboard could slide down.

His moves were captured in short snippets and poses, which were then linked together with “a lot of physics and math,” according to Garcin.

Props simulating rails were also brought in to record how McMorris jumps on and off them.