720 Degrees - The Definitive Classic Arcade Skateboarding Game

Introduction

In the golden era of arcades in the 1980s, a new genre of sports games was born that allowed players to experience the thrill and style of skateboarding from the comfort of their local mall or pizza joint. 720 Degrees, released in 1986, stands out as one of the most iconic and influential classic arcade skateboarding games of that era. Developed and published by Sega, 720 Degrees captured the essence of skateboarding with simple yet addictive gameplay and pioneering tricks and combos that had never been seen before in a video game. With its vibrant graphics, rocking soundtrack, and endless replayability, 720 Degrees was an instant classic that continues to be beloved by retro gamers nearly four decades later. In this comprehensive review, we'll take an in-depth look at what made 720 Degrees such a groundbreaking hit, analyzing its gameplay, level design, audio/visuals, and lasting influence. Whether you're a long-time fan looking to relive the nostalgia or a newcomer curious about this retro gem, this is the definitive guide to the 720 Degrees game experience.

Bare Essence of Skateboarding

While many modern skateboarding games like the Tony Hawk and Skate series feature massive open-world environments and photo-realistic graphics, 720 Degrees strips the sport down to its bare essence in brilliant arcade style. There's no need for an elaborate story or cinematic presentation - the joy comes from the simple act of skateboarding itself. The game starts you off in the classic half-pipe level, a straightforward setup that lets you get a feel for the basic mechanics. Using the joystick and twobutoons, you'll pump your skater back and forth to build up speed and launch into the air where you can pull off electrifying mid-air tricks and combos. From the very first kickflip, 720 Degrees nails the feeling of skateboarding better than any other game that came before it. The sense of momentum, the satisfying snap of catching air off a ramp, and the timing required to nail advanced maneuvers like 720 spins all feel perfect. It's easy to pick up but offers incredible depth once you start chaining tricks together in endless combos. Despite the simple 2D presentation, 720 Degrees features gameplay that stands the test of time. The controls are tight and responsive, the physics feel grounded and consistent, and most importantly, it's an absolute blast from start to finish.

Build Your Own Skate Park

While the basic half-pipe technically could provide endless gameplay thanks to the high skill ceiling for chaining tricks, 720 Degrees goes beyond by offering a brilliant level creation mode. Using a simple but intuitive grid editor, you can construct your own skate park playground by placing ramps, rails, pools, and dozens of other modules in any layout you can imagine. This user-generated content allows an infinite number of level possibilities to skate and master. You can recreate famous skate parks, design outrageous stunt courses, or craft technical sprawls focused on specific trick lines. Every level is a fresh challenge with new ways to push your skills to the limits. 720 Degrees was the first game to truly open the door to custom skate level creation through an in-game editor. It added an extraordinary amount of variety and laid the foundation for future games to expand on park editing tools in increasingly robust ways.

Multiplayer Skate Sessions

Of course, what skate park would be complete without a crew to skate with? 720 Degrees supported local multiplayer for up to four players to take turns sessioning the same level in an epic skate sesh. Pulling off insane combos and setting new high scores created an incredible social atmosphere as you battled friends for bragging rights as the sickest skater. While primitive by today's online standards, the couch multiplayer was an outstanding addition that allowed players to come together and directly compete in a way not possible through the single-player mode alone. 720 Degrees helped kickstart the appeal of social competitive skateboarding gameplay that carried on for decades.

Effortless Style and Radical Tunes

Vibrant Visuals and Animation

For its time, 720 Degrees featured visuals that were incredibly vibrant and stylish. While the 2D skaters were relatively simple sprite-based character models, their animation was incredibly smooth and lent the action an effortless sense of style and flow. Seeing your skater catch air and whip through a kickflip or 900-degree spin looked amazing thanks to the fluid motion and physics. Subtle details like the board rotating during spins and your skater tucking legs and pumping arms to build speed brought it all to life. The level backgrounds, while simplistic, managed to capture a distinct atmosphere and vibe for each location. Whether grinding through the industrial venice beach area, launching off massive ramps through the bustling downtown cityscape, or shredding pools in the suburbs, each stage oozed its own personality. The bold color palette, chunky retro pixel art, and active camerawork all came together to create graphics that oozed style and didn't need to be technically complex to immerse you in the world of skateboarding.

Radical Chiptunes and Sound Effects

While visuals played an important role in bringing 720 Degrees to life, the pounding chiptune soundtrack is what really set the tone and seared the game's existence into the minds of everyone who played it back in the day. The main theme song is an absolute face-melter of classic 80s synthesizers and driving percussion that beautifully captures the grit, attitude, and adrenaline of skateboarding. Each level is accompanied by its own heart-pumping music track that ramps up the intensity and energy as you chain together bigger combos. From the smooth funk of the beach level jam to the frantic concert crowd cheers of the rooftop stage music, every song is an incredible earworm that'll have you nodding your head harder than you thought possible. The sound effects are just as key, with meaty thunks and thuds as you skate across different surfaces, satisfying snaps of catching air, and an assortment of foley effects as you grind across rails, transfer gaps, and nail those sweet 720 spins. In short, the audio design is pure video game magic that achieves an indescribable level of immersion.

An Enduring Cultural Impact

While most pop culture phenomena from the 1980s eventually fade into obscurity, a select few classics like 720 Degrees have achieved a lasting legacy and influence on entire genres. More than just a killer skating game, 720 Degrees' impact can be felt across the decades in how it pioneered gameplay mechanics, design philosophies, and most importantly, a cultural appreciation for skateboarding gaming.

Pioneering Trick Combos

Before 720 Degrees, no skateboarding game had ever attempted to recreate the feeling of chaining together multiple aerial tricks in a single combo run from the ramps and transitions. By focusing so heavily on encouraging and enabling players to build scoring runs off of consecutive flip tricks, grinds, and spins, 720 Degrees essentially founded the key tenet that would come to define nearly ever skating game in the future. While the original Tony Hawk Pro Skater is often credited with popularizing the trick combo system, it built upon the foundations laid by 720 Degrees' trick combos core loop. This legacy can also be traced to other narrative skating games like the Skate series that made stringing together "lines" and improvisational trick combos a core gameplay pillar. In many ways, 720 Degrees was the original genesis of making stylistic trick runs and combos the driving motivation behind skateboarding games.

Skate Culture Roots

Another undeniable contribution of 720 Degrees is how it helped expose broader audiences to appreciation skateboarding as not just a sport or passtime, but a vibrant culture and art form. While real-life skating videos and magazines had existed for years, this classic game provided one of the first interactive portals into capturing the style, attitude and self-expression inherent to the skate lifestyle. By celebrating the performance and showmanship of chaining together flashy trick combos with your own creative lines, 720 Degrees captured the essence of skateboarding's counter-culture roots. The punk/hip-hop influenced visuals, music, and urban environments reinforced the idea of skateboarding as something raw, dangerous, and uniquely individualistic compared to mainstream sports. For many young gamers, 720 Degrees awoke an appreciation of skateboarding that went beyond just the gameplay to encompass the culture and mindset behind it. This shift in perception no doubt influenced the mainstream popularity and widespread adoption of skateboarding fashion, music, and identity that became massively mainstream by the early 2000s.

Defining the Arcade Skating Genre

While subsequent skating games would iterate and build upon the core skating experience, 720 Degrees will always be remembered as the original masterpiece that defined the arcade skateboarding video game genre from the ground up. From pioneering the trick combo system to bringing skating culture to the mainstream to influencing the audio/visual language of how skating games present themselves, you can draw a straight line from 720 Degrees to every single skating game that came after it. Without this breakthrough classic, it's impossible to imagine the entire genre having evolved in the same direction with anywhere near the impact and quality. Decades after its release, 720 Degrees remains a shining example of ingenious game design melding together mechanics, culture, style, and substance. While other games built bigger skate playgrounds to ride, 720 Degrees carved out the foundations that literally gave the skating game its heart and soul.

Enduring and Challenging Fun

So how does the 720 Degrees gameplay actually hold up in the modern era? Not only is it still an absolute blast with no signs of aging poorly, but it also remains one of the most challenging and replayable arcade sports titles ever made. Playing 720 Degrees today is an incredibly satisfying throwback that perfectly demonstrates how to craft addictive, no-frills game loops driven entirely by player skill mastery. Whether you're playing the original arcade cabinet, Sega Genesis port, or through modern emulation, the experience is just as fun today as it was in 1986.

Deceptively Deep Combat System

On the surface, the core gameplay loop of 720 Degrees seems simple: skate back and forth in a level, build speed, then launch into the air and rack up points by chaining together flip tricks, grinds, grabs, and rotational spins. While this mechanic is easy to learn, mastering it is an entirely different story. There is an incredible amount of depth, nuance, and skill expression waiting to be tapped in 720 Degrees. Things like precise timing, combined trick routes, transitions, and efficiency in chaining everything together into a flawless run quickly rise to the forefront as you progress. Suddenly, the simple half-pipe alone becomes an endless puzzle as you attempt to carve out the single highest-scoring run imaginable. The challenging design comes in how 720 Degrees demands perfect execution and an innate understanding of the momentum physics to truly maximize your point totals. Mess up the timing on a flip trick, mis-angle a grind, or eat it on a sloppy landing and your entire run is ruined. Chaining together 10+ trick combos requires incredible focus, stamina, and mental route-mapping to pull off. While initially accessible, 720 Degrees has a ludicrously high skill ceiling for advanced tricksters seeking records and bragging rights. Becoming a true master skater in the game requires a level of dedication and discipline most won't have the perseverance to achieve.

Endless Creativity and Customization

One major aspect that gives 720 Degrees unlimited replay value and an ever-evolving challenge is the ability for players to custom build skate parks and share them with each other online through emulation communities. As previously detailed, the in-game course creator gave players an expansive sandbox to design stages of any size, scope, and difficulty. In the modern era, 720 Degrees has become a celebrated cult classic with players constantly pushing the envelope and crafting jaw-droppingly technical skate park creations. Everything from faithful recreations of legendary spots like Burnside, Wallenberg, and the Combi pool have been made in painstaking detail. And that's just the tip of the iceberg, as the vibrant 720 Degrees community pumps out insane skate park levels filled with spine-defying gaps, impossible grind lines, and epic vert ramps tailor-made solely to push the limits of what's possible with creative course design and high-level skating skill. Every few months, some new stage or batch of stages gets uploaded and becomes the new rage to dissect and master. This constant influx of fresh handcrafted challenges helps keep 720 Degrees gameplay experience feeling endlessly rejuvenated rather than stagnant.

720 Degrees - The Definitive Verdict

After going in-depth and analyzing every facet of 720 Degrees from its pioneering gameplay to shockingly deep mastery elements, one thing should be clear - this classic arcade gem is an enduring masterpiece that absolutely deserves enshrinement among the greatest skateboarding games and sports titles of all time. While it may appear rudimentary on the surface to modern gamers weaned on photorealistic open worlds, the simplicity and purity of 720 Degrees' lean skateboarding action is precisely what makes it so special and timeless. There is an essence of skateboarding culture and style baked into the core of 720 Degrees' design that feels truly authentic and revolutionary. Developer Sega tapped into the indescribable feeling of catching air and chaining tricks together that made skateboarding such an exhilarating art form. Then they sprinkled in the style, attitude, and punk aesthetic that encapsulated skating as a lifestyle and counterculture phenomenon. What results is an ethereal mixture of artistry and athletics that makes you feel like a complete badass in a way most sports games can't replicate.

An Untouchable Arcade Experience

720 Degrees isn't just one of the greatest arcades skating games - it's one of the greatest arcade games ever made, period. By combining an easy-to-learn yet endlessly mastery-driven gameplay loop with vibrant graphics and an unforgettable soundtrack, 720 Degrees practically defines the very essence of the addictive and enduring old-school arcade experience. The core mechanics are as satisfying today as they were in the 80s, with the precision, skill, and stamina required to pull off insane trick combos still a feat few players will ever truly conquer. The ability for user created stages to continually extend and remix the entire experience only enhances this longevity factor. Most importantly though, 720 Degrees offers an authentic cultural experience that is difficult to replicate or truly capture outside of this specific gaming artifact. It's a time capsule that encapsulates the energy, attitude, and euphoric individualism that defined skateboarding and punk culture in the 80s in a way younger generations may never know otherwise.

A Game Truly For The Skaters

At the end of the day, 720 Degrees is one of the rare games that seems purpose-built solely for the love of skateboarding and capturing its essence in interactive form. While many modern skating titles pile on extraneous narrative fluff or overcomplex the experience, 720 Degrees is pure, uncut, and true to its sport in a way that feels immensely refreshing. Whether you're a modern gamer looking for a challenging and stylish arcade skating experience or an old-school skater who lived through the 80s glory days, 720 Degrees is absolutely essential playing for anyone who appreciates the artistry and beauty behind skateboarding and its gaming legacy. Fire up your arcade emulator or dust off that vintage Sega Genesis and get ready to have your mind blown by one of the most iconic and influential skateboarding games ever created.

Final Thoughts

720 Degrees' legacy cannot be overstated in how it pioneered skateboarding video game mechanics like trick combos while also shining an authentic light on skating culture and style. Simple yet endlessly replayable with addictive gameplay, 720 Degrees was a revelation for the arcades that forever changed how we play and appreciate skateboarding games. A true classic through and through.