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If you told me I'd be waking up to an outpouring of love for Activision and Treyarch's Kelly Slater's Pro Surfer, a 24-year-old sports game, I probably wouldn't have believed you.
After all, it's not exactly a game that comes up naturally in many conversations today, with most people I know typically only mentioning it as one of those other sports games that Activision released, when talking about Tony Hawk's Pro Skater.
Regardless, that's the pretty bizarre situation I found myself in this morning as I opened social media to find pretty much every other message on my timeline was some reference to the 2002 multi-platform (for PC, Xbox, PS2, Nintendo GameCube) surfing title.
Admittedly, the cause of this sudden resurgence, 20 years after the fact, was incredibly easy to track down, with the instigator of this love-fest being an Xbox Nostalgia account that had posted a roughly one-minute-long clip of the game in action. But that still doesn't explain the post's virality, with pretty much every other recent video it had tweeted struggling to reach 100 retweets, while this one had cleared 1000, with ease.
That, instead, had more to do with the game's "stunning" water graphics, which seem to be winning over a whole new generation of fans.
GVG's Jon Cartwright, for instance, stated in response, "Why is this the best looking water ever?" momentarily forgetting games like Sea of Thieves and Wave Race: Blue Storm (I'll chalk this down to the UK heatwave frying people's brains). Meanwhile, the tech artist Nick Anderson was also blown away by the effect, writing, "I spend my days making water shaders, and love the history of water in games. How did I never see this game before? It's incredible!"
Notably, these two weren't the only ones impressed, either, with a huge wave (see what I did there!) of commentators taking a similar stance on the title. These include the YouTuber Spawn Wave, the Washington Post games & culture critic Gene Park, and the aptly titled About Fishing developer The Water Museum.
"Looks incredible," The Water Museum wrote. "And I don’t think it’s anything crazy tech-wise. Looks like the artist just gradually shifted to that teal colour on the wave based on the height. Creating something yourself and pushing it past realism > letting modern shader/lighting tech create it for you."
All in all, it's pretty cool to see a developer's work being praised like this all these years later, and I hope that whoever was involved in this aspect of the game is aware of this sudden, yet surprising outpouring of love.