A three-page interview (first page below) over the new skating game for the Playstation 3 and XBOX 360! Some new details on this great game are revealed! Anyone interested in the game?

Every once in a while, a game comes along that redefines how gamers will look at its genre from that point on. In the same way that Fight Night reinvented boxing games, EA hopes to do the same to the skateboarding genre with skate. Featuring physics and gesture-based dual-analog control, the game aims to put gamers into the shoes of an actual skater and put the focus back on individual tricks rather than massive, unrealistic lines.

We had a chance to fire off a number of our most pressing questions to EA Black Box's Scott Blackwood, executive producer on the game. Here's what he had to say:

IGN: First, the obvious question: What prompted you to create a direct competitor to the Tony Hawk franchise, which has quickly killed off attempts at other skating franchises?

Scott Blackwood: Well, that was a quick jump right to the inevitable question - good work! We wanted to make a skateboarding game for a variety of reasons but as there is currently only one skateboarding game out there, it appears that we are in direct competition with that product. That being said, quite a few of the people on the team are skaters and the inspiration to do something new and different can be traced as far back to 720° as much as to the Hawk series.

IGN: skate is a much more realistic game than most skateboarding titles we've seen in the past. While skaters will almost certainly appreciate this from the get-go, are you worried that non-skaters may not "get it" right away?

Blackwood: Of course, we have to have gamers, as well as skaters, in mind as we are developing skate. We're aware that we're running that fine line between realism and what works best for a video game but from what we've seen so far everyone seems to be "getting it." One example - we've heard time and time again that the un-natural hyperdrive speed of other skate games has made the monumental feats of real skateboarding seem trivial, so one of the biggest things for us was to create a groundbreaking physics engine that would allow us to really sell the 'feel' of skating to a non-skater. The first time you hit a gnarly grind or succumb to physics by bombing a big hill, you'll understand what I'm talking about.

IGN: Where did the idea for the control scheme come from? Was it inspired by EA Chicago's Fight Night series?

Blackwood: People seem to compare the controls to Fight Night and that's great. But in reality we were inspired more by a frustration with memorizing button mashing combos as we were any other single game out there. As much as we enjoyed and played the hell out of the last generation of skate games, eventually just hitting buttons and watching a canned animation got stale. The button schemes get more and more complicated and the visceral sensation of actual skateboarding was lacking. We went to the roots of the mechanics of skating and arrived at something that is very intuitive and surprisingly accessible for first timers.

If there were any actual games that acted as inspiration they'd probably be Tiger Woods (the swing control made all other golf games irrelevant), 720° (got to give props to the arcade classic), and even Street Fighter (easy-to-play but hard-to-master controls).

Sakura via ps3.ign.com »