In 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. (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. They had about 10 people working with them back then; now they’re directors of a studio of 80.
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. 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.
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 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 seems to me that something has changed, certainly within the studio but perhaps also with skateboarding culture and what (and whom) it represents.
“My experience of getting back into skating in my 30s has been with way different groups of people,” says John. “The women’s scene has blown up. 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.”
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. 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.
Unsurprisingly, plenty of the people at Roll7 are involved with the sport in real life. 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. “OlliOlli 1 and 2 were made from the perspective of skating when we were younger, when everyone thought they might go pro,” he says. “We’ve reached the age now where we all know our career is not gonna be in skating. People aren’t trying to be the best at it, they’re just doing it because they’re having a really good time.”
Simon and John wanted people to have a good time making the game, too – something that comes across in the cheerful aesthetic. “There was a mentality change about how to make video games when we started on OlliOlli World,” says John. “All our previous games had been quite stressful; not a lot of people crunched [worked unpaid overtime] on them, but we as directors definitely crunched, we took on a lot, and it was hell. Going into this we thought: let’s try to actually have fun while we’re making it.”
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. 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. 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.
“The team have been so positive throughout what has been the most traumatising thing of our generation,” he says. “I feel like OlliOlli World is their reaction to the world being very, very fucked up. They’ve created somewhere else that they’d all like to be. That’s how I look at the game. I mean, I’d rather be in there, it’s a happy place … I want people to miss their train stop because they got lost in a level, locked into that happy state of flow.”
OlliOlli World is released for PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox, Nintendo Switch and PC on 8 February.
