1080° Snowboarding dev says the game was created to show off the N64 controller, with the idea spawning from one of Miyamoto's hobbies

Giles Goddard is one of the original developers of 1080° Snowboarding on the N64. Mr. Goddard is working on his own snowboarding title right now, but in a recent interview with Eurogamer, he took some time to talk about the creation of the N64 game.

"The process of the original 1080° Snowboarding was tweaking and tweaking the controls almost from day one through to debugging, and I think it shows in the way that it's an extremely - and obviously I'm biased - but it's an extremely well-balanced game in the controls.

"1080° Snowboarding, I feel at least, there was so much depth to the control system, things like crouching down to go faster and then you have less control, when you jump and in order to soften the landing if you time the button press right your legs take the impact. One of the reasons for doing 1080° Snowboarding originally was to show off the controller of the N64 - the analogue stick side of it. Nintendo games up until that point were left, right, up and down. All the games that come out with the N64 were very much focussed on the controller, and that pushed us towards that analogue feel."

Where did the idea for 1080° Snowboarding first come from? Not surprisingly, it was inspired by one of Miyamoto's hobbies. Turns out back in the day, Miyamoto was quite the avid skiier. Instead of going with a skiing game, Nintendo opted for snowboarding, as that was becoming quite popular in the 90s.