1080 Snowboarding Title Theme Animatic (1998, Nintendo EAD)
191080°'s soundtrack of "techno and rappy beats" with "thrashy, foozed-out vocals" was composed by Kenta Nagata, who also composed soundtracks for Mario Kart 64 and other Nintendo games.
1080° Snowboarding is a snowboard racing video game developed and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo 64 and first released in Japan on 28 February 1998. It was re-released on the Wii's Virtual Console service in 2008. The player controls one of five playable snowboarders from a third-person perspective using a combination of buttons to jump and perform tricks over eight levels.
1080° was announced on 21 November 1997 and developed over nine months; it garnered critical acclaim and won an Interactive Achievement Award from the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences. 1080° sold over a million units, and a second installment, 1080° Avalanche, was released for the Nintendo GameCube on 28 November 2003.
The player controls a snowboarder in one of six modes. 1080° has two trick modes (trick attack and contest), three race modes (race, time attack, and multiplayer), a training mode, and an options mode. The objective of the game is either to arrive quickly at a level's finish line or to receive maximum points for trick combinations.
In 1080°'s two trick modes, trick attack and contest, players accrue points from completed tricks. In contest mode, players perform tricks and snowboard past flags for points. Trick attack mode requires players to perform a series of tricks throughout a designated level. The game features 25 tricks, all of which are performed by using a combination of circular positions of the control stick, the R button, and the B button; point values are allocated based on complexity and required time. The two types of tricks are grab tricks, in which the board is grabbed in a specific way, or spin tricks, in which the snowboarder spins the board a certain number of degrees. The 1080° spin requires nine actions, the most of any trick in the game.
1080° sold 1,230,000 units in the United States, and over 23,000 in Japan. It did not, however, match the success of the developers' first game, Wave Race 64 which sold 1,950,000 units in the United States and 154,000 in Japan. In 2001, one of 1080°'s snowboarders, Kensuke Kimachi, appeared on a trophy in the game Super Smash Bros. Melee. 1080° Avalanche, a sequel to 1080°, was released for the Nintendo GameCube in 2003; Avalanche received a harsher critical reception, averaging 73/100 on Metacritic, due to "frame rate issues and limited gameplay". 1080° was re-released on Nintendo's Virtual Console service in Japan on 15 January 2008, Europe on 18 January 2008 and North America on 28 January 2008. The music for the Golden Forest track can be heard in Super Smash Bros. Brawl.