As they were for many of us during the pandemic, games became an escape as Simon sees it, Radlandia became a kind of collective fantasy for everyone working on it. Where previously they’d brought everyone working on the game together every two weeks or so to show their progress and hang out, now that wasn’t an option. Roll7 has been a remote studio since 2016, but a few months into development on this game, the pandemic hit and took remote work to a whole new level as Simon points out, people weren’t just working from home, they were imprisoned in their houses. More diverse, more colourful … a PS5 screenshot of OlliOlli World. Going into this we thought: let’s try to actually have fun while we’re making it.” “All our previous games had been quite stressful not a lot of people crunched on them, but we as directors definitely crunched, we took on a lot, and it was hell. “There was a mentality change about how to make video games when we started on OlliOlli World,” says John. Simon and John wanted people to have a good time making the game, too – something that comes across in the cheerful aesthetic. People aren’t trying to be the best at it, they’re just doing it because they’re having a really good time.” “We’ve reached the age now where we all know our career is not gonna be in skating. “OlliOlli 1 and 2 were made from the perspective of skating when we were younger, when everyone thought they might go pro,” he says. The character design lead used to be a pro, and a team member once joined a meeting from A&E having had an unfortunate collision with a car while skating. Unsurprisingly, plenty of the people at Roll7 are involved with the sport in real life. If Tony Hawk’s represented the skate culture at that time (very male, very competitive), OlliOlli World represents it now: more diverse, more colourful and altogether more welcoming. When you think of skateboarding and video games, you may think of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, the delightfully gratifying PlayStation classics that blew up around the turn of the millennium – around the time that John and Simon were skating in their late teens and 20s. ‘Let’s try to have fun while we’re making it’ … Roll7’s Simon Bennett (left) and John Ribbins at Hop King skate park in London. There’s always been queer people in skateboarding but you’d never have seen that representation even seven years ago … Making this game, I was thinking of a lot of the people I skate with now that it would be cool to make a game they feel represented by.” “My experience of getting back into skating in my 30s has been with way different groups of people,” says John. It seems to me that something has changed, certainly within the studio but perhaps also with skateboarding culture and what (and whom) it represents. The levels in OlliOlli were once based on the fairly dismal view from John and Simon’s office in Deptford this game is set in a colourful skateboarding paradise called Radlandia. It’s a hugely appealing game – and where Roll7’s previous OlliOlli skating games from 2014-15 were technical, demanding and just a touch sterile, this one couldn’t be more out there. The art, a mix between the kind of mural you might find in a London skate park and the strange but cutesy cartoonish vibe of something like Adventure Time, contrasts with an extremely chill soundtrack that soothes your nerves as you try to pull off awesome chains of tricks.Ĭharacterful tribute to skateboarding … OlliOlli World’s avatar creator. I’d spent a few days playing Roll7’s latest game, OlliOlli World – an exuberant and characterful tribute to skateboarding, with wild levels full of rails and walls to grind and weird characters such as sentient trees and buff seagulls pottering around in the background. They had about 10 people working with them back then now they’re directors of a studio of 80. (I do not join in – sadly the immense skills that I have built up over 20 years of playing skating games do not in any way translate into real life.) In 2014, their studio Roll7 released a fondly remembered and notoriously tricky skateboarding game called OlliOlli – an experience that prompted them, both lapsed skaters who were obsessive about it in their teens, to get back out on the streets in real life. I n a skate park under the arches near London Bridge, a couple of game developers called John Ribbins and Simon Bennett are messing around in a half-pipe.
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