Interviews// Jay Balmer, Associate Producer, SKATE

SPOnG: Yeh, 130 guys on the team – that’s pretty hardcore and an impressively large team! How many of those people are skateboarders?

Jay Balmer: Well, I think we’ve made a lot of skateboarders as well as already having a core group of skaters on the team. They range from having years of experience to some… many of the designers are now regularly skating sessions at the indoor skatepark we have in Vancouver, where it’s open for anyone on the team to come out.

It’s hard to say among the team exactly how many skaters we have… Vancouver is also something of a skate capital in itself… And remember out of the 130 people we have there are a lot of areas of the game to build – from the expansive city, to the audio, to the skateboarding and animation, to the challenges and progression… not to mention all the technical, core stuff hidden behind it all as well as all the QA/testing guys making sure we’re always on the right track… but then hey! That’s what it takes to make a next gen game!

SPOnG: The first time I remember hearing about the game I remember that EA claimed that it was ‘by skaters for skaters’ – is this how you’re looking to market the game? (At least within the skateboarding community?)

Jay Balmer: Well that’s not just marketing. That’s kinda… well, it is our reality. Not everybody [on the team] is a skateboarder, but those of use driving the vision and have been involved from the beginning are there first and foremost as skateboarders. So while it has to be a great game for gamers as well, which has involved taking on designers on the team who are gamers but not skaters… But as myself, I want it to be both a great game and a great skateboarding experience… so yeh, I’m a skater and I’m here to bring skateboarding to life – not just for skaters, but for gamers too. We really hope everybody that plays the game gets that incredibly cool feeling of what actual skateboarding is like.

SPOnG: You’ve already got Danny Way, Gonz and a number of other pro skaters involved with the game – can you say a little bit more about how they are getting involved? Do they just provide their name and likeness or are they involved in other ways?

Jay Balmer: We really didn’t want to just have a face to the game – y’know “Danny Way’s Skater” or whatever – part of our goal in keeping it authentic and saying ‘by skaters’ was to get pro skaters heavily involved. We’ve been working with Danny before we even entered into production – figuring out what the overall direction for the game should be, would this be something that was right for the skate community, were we adding something that should be out there and so on…We certainly didn’t want to make something that was some sort of ‘stick on’ or just taking advantage of the popularity of skateboarding or whatever.

So, Danny was helpful in those ways as well as also helping to bring in other skaters too – he’s someone who has a huge amount of respect and he doesn’t attach his name lightly to anything, so when he signed on, others immediately felt better about the project.

Then once people become involved we continually use them – getting them to regularly test the game, right from the early wireframe days – as well as picking the overall style, the music they want to skate to and so on. So as well as the obvious stuff – motion-capturing all these guys to capture the many different styles of skating – they also help to design the direction of various challenges in the game, help to design the various locations across the city… So when we say ‘by skater’ it’s not just the development team – that refers to the pro skaters involved too.