360 on Xbox

MTX: Mototrax was published by Activision and developed by Left Field Productions for the PS2 and Xbox. At the time I worked with LFP, they had a small office suite next to the Kumon tutoring center in Westlake Village, California. Fellow Designer Brent Clearman and I shared a window office on the second floor and would hear the stampede of elementary school children's feet every day at 3PM.

I was responsible for a few of the Freestyle arenas but my focus was on the Freeride environments - wide open spaces about a square mile in size where the player could explore, ride, and trick off of natural elements like dry creek beds, mountains, and Travis Pastrana's garage. My wacky stunt-designing abilities honed in the development in the Rush games came to bear in motocross form. However, greater attention to detail was needed as compared to Rush, where most of the driving surfaces were procedurally generated by Multigen's Road Tools. In MTX, Designers hand-crafted every jump, slope, and berm with the perfect number of polygons to compliment both the look and feel of the driving surface.

I remember putting a lot of work into the Pastrana Compound environment and was not lucky enough to visit the actual location with other Left Field and Activision employees for reference. Maybe I was luckier that I didn't get to go: the lure of launching a vehicle off a specially made ramp into Travis' custom foam pit (where he remarked in a recent interview he's landed double-backflips thousands of times) was too much to resist for one Associate Producer. My coworkers brought back video of this dude riding a ten-speed bike towards the ramp and foam pit. He half-heartedly pumped the pedals and didn't build up enough speed to catch air and land into the pit. What he did catch was the side of the foam pit, and an aluminum ladder that was leaning up against it.

I'm certain that waivers had been signed, but he was lucky he wasn't hurt. Later on in development, I did make sure to get his approval of the ramp and foam pit, as well as the placement of the ladder.

For the freestyle MX career that ends with the final against Travis Pastrana himself I carefully watched and recreated his gold medal run at X Games 2003 that he capped off with a trick called the 360, shaping and repositioning each dirt and metal ramp to give our AI the best chance and authentically duplicating his entire run and each and every trick!

Here's the YouTube video link of the footage I studied (in German!): Travis Pastrana X-Games 2003