Snowboarding video game
Snowboarding games are a subgenre of sports video games that simulate the sports of snowboarding and sandboarding. Most snowboarding games are seasonal and come out sometime between October and March. The genre peaked in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Many online casual games have been made for the genre recently. Likewise, several games have been made for iOS and Android mobile devices. Arcade snowboarding games have a physical snowboard on which the player can step and use instead of a joystick or gamepad. Popular snowboarding game franchises include "Cool Boarders" by Sony Computer Entertainment, "1080°  Snowboarding" by Nintendo, and "SSX" by EA Sports. History. Namco's "Alpine Racer" (1994) was a skiing winter sports simulator that became a major success in arcades during the mid-1990s. This led to a wave of similar sports games capitalizing on its success during the late 1990s, from companies such as Sega, Namco, Konami and Innovative Concepts. In 1996, two snowboarding video games were released: Namco's "Alpine Surfer" in the arcades, and the UEP Systems game "Cool Boarders" for the PlayStation console. The following year, Square's popular role-playing video game, "Final Fantasy VII", included a snowboarding minigame  that was later released as an independent snowboarding game, "Final Fantasy VII Snowboarding", for mobile phones. In 2000, "SSX" was released by EA Sports. Based around boardercross, the game featured fast downhill races, avoiding various objects whilst using others to perform jumps and increase the player's speed.