Longboard: Stunts and Tricks

Longboard: Stunts and Tricks is an action sports game where players control a virtual longboard down winding, mountainous roads. The game features three distinct racing modes: a time trial where you race against the clock, a sprint race where you must overtake rivals to finish first, and an eliminator race where the last skater to cross each checkpoint is disqualified. Players can choose from four unique longboards and compete against professional AI skaters, performing tricks and navigating hairpin turns on serpentine tracks in this simulation of extreme downhill racing.

Longboard: Stunts and Tricks: A Forgotten Asphalt Odyssey

In the vast and ever-expanding library of Steam, countless titles are released, briefly illuminated by the storefront’s algorithmic spotlight before fading into the digital ether. Some games deserve this obscurity; others become curious footnotes, relics of a specific moment in indie development. Longboard: Stunts and Tricks, a 2018 release from the enigmatic Coffee-Powered Games, is one such artifact. It is a game that embodies both the aspirational dreams of small-scale development and the harsh realities of execution, a title that promised the thrill of downhill asphalt ballet but delivered a experience more akin to a wobbly first ride on a borrowed board. This review seeks to excavate this obscure title, analyzing its ambitions, its shortcomings, and its quiet, almost non-existent, place in the pantheon of extreme sports games.

Development History & Context

The Studio and The Vision

Longboard: Stunts and Tricks was developed and initially published by Coffee-Powered Games, a studio so elusive that its name is its most defining characteristic. The development landscape of the late 2010s was a golden age for indie accessibility; the Unity engine had matured into a powerful and, crucially, affordable toolset, and digital distribution via Steam provided a direct pipeline to a global audience. It is within this context that Coffee-Powered Games operated, a likely small team or even a solo developer aiming to carve out a niche in the action-sports genre.

The vision, as gleaned from the official Steam description, was clear: to capture the specific thrill of longboard downhill racing, a discipline distinct from its more popular trick-oriented cousin, skateboarding. The focus was on speed, precision, and the negotiation of “winding tracks with hairpins” on “mountainous roads.” This was not to be a Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater competitor set in a skatepark, but a pure racing experience, an attempt to translate the niche, adrenaline-fueled sport of competitive longboarding into a digital format. The commitment to this specific vision is evident in the game’s very title and its structured approach to racing modes.

Technological Constraints and The Gaming Landscape

Built on the Unity engine, the game was a product of its time. Unity allowed for rapid development and deployment across platforms, hence its simultaneous April 2018 release on Windows and Macintosh. However, the accessibility of Unity also meant the market was flooded with low-effort asset flips and underwhelming projects, a stigma that a game like Longboard would have struggled against from the outset.

Its release placed it in a curious spot within the genre. It was not competing with the AAA polish of projects like Skate or the arcade chaos of SSX. Instead, it existed in a lower tier alongside other obscure indie sports titles like ATV Drift & Tricks (2017) or Tricks and Treats (2017). Its ambition was modest: to provide a focused, no-frills simulation of its chosen sport. The technological constraints are implied by the available data; the lack of extensive credits, promotional materials, or graphical showcases suggests a project built on a shoestring budget, where ambition may have outpaced resources.

Narrative & Thematic Deep Dive

To discuss the narrative of Longboard: Stunts and Tricks is to engage with its most profound absence. The game operates in a purely mechanical and thematic realm, entirely devoid of a traditional plot, characters, or dialogue. There is no story mode, no rival to overcome, no narrative of an underdog rising through the ranks of a longboarding circuit.

The narrative is instead emergent and purely player-driven. It is the story you construct in your own mind: the amateur skater (one of the selectable, yet unnamed, “longboarding masters”) attempting to “increase your level” and “pass the way from the amateur skater to the longboarding master!” as the official description promises. The “characters” are blank slates, defined not by personality or backstory but by their function as vessels for player control. The dialogue is the silent concentration of the player, the muttered frustration after catching a wheel on a hairpin turn and tumbling down a mountainside.

Thematically, the game is singularly focused on the pure pursuit of mastery. It explores themes of velocity, risk, and reward. The winding “serpentine” track is a relentless opponent; the obstacles and hairpins are the challenges to be conquered. The core thematic tension is between the desire for ultimate speed and the necessity of control—a metaphor that extends far beyond the game itself. The title’s promise of “stunts and tricks” is somewhat misleading, as the primary theme is not flamboyant expression but disciplined racing. The trick system, assumed from the genre classification, appears to be a secondary element to the core racing mechanic, a way to perhaps gain small boosts or points rather than to express a unique style. The game is, therefore, a thematic ode to the minutiae of a niche sport, a digital homage to the feeling of asphalt blurring beneath your feet.

Gameplay Mechanics & Systems

Core Gameplay Loop

The core loop of Longboard: Stunts and Tricks is built around its three distinct racing modes, which provide the primary structure for the experience:
1. Race Against Time: A straightforward time trial mode. The player must “overcome the distance over a certain period of time,” competing against the clock rather than other riders.
2. Sprint Race: A traditional race against AI opponents. The objective is to “drive as fast as possible, overtake all rivals and finish first.”
3. Eliminator Race: The most strategic of the modes. Players race, and “the last racer to cross a checkpoint is disqualified,” creating a tense game of survival and positioning.

This trio of modes suggests a desire for variety, aiming to cater to different playstyles—the solitary perfectionist, the direct competitor, and the tactical survivor.

Controls, Physics, and Progression

The heart of any racing or sports game is its feel, and here the details are tragically sparse. The game utilizes a behind-view perspective, common in racing games, to emphasize speed and the road ahead. The physics engine, built in Unity, would have been paramount. The success of the entire game hinged on whether the longboards felt satisfyingly weighty and responsive, whether drifting around a hairpin felt like a calculated risk or a random occurrence.

The official description mentions four unique longboards, implying a light vehicle customization system where players might choose between boards optimized for stability, speed, or agility. Furthermore, the game features a leveling system, inviting players to “increase your level” as they progress, presumably unlocking new boards, tracks, or cosmetic items for the anonymous skaters. This meta-progression system was a essential hook to keep players engaged beyond the initial novelty.

UI and Innovation

The user interface was likely minimal: a speedometer, a timer or position indicator, and perhaps a trick multiplier or score counter. The true innovation, or lack thereof, would have been in its execution. The game’s potential to stand out rested on its ability to simulate the unique feel of longboarding—the deep carves, the precarity of high speeds on a narrow deck—in a way that hadn’t been done before in a dedicated title. Without hands-on experience, it’s impossible to judge its success, but its obscurity suggests it likely failed to capture the nuanced physicality of the sport in a compelling way.

World-Building, Art & Sound

The world of Longboard: Stunts and Tricks is its track—a single, described as a “mountainous road” featuring a “wandering serpentine” of obstacles and hairpins. This suggests a singular environment, a continuous downhill run rather than a variety of globally inspired locales. This focus on one type of terrain aligns with the game’s niche ambition: it is a simulation of a specific experience, not a world tour.

The art direction, inferred from the genre and technology, was likely functional. Built in Unity, it would have utilized available assets to create a roadside environment with guardrails, trees, and asphalt textures. The goal was not stylistic flair but creating a believable enough space for the racing to occur. The atmosphere was intended to be one of intense, focused speed—the thrill of the descent.

The sound design would have been critical in selling the fantasy. The absence of any mention of a licensed soundtrack points to a focus on diegetic sound: the roar of urethane wheels on pavement, the rush of wind, the scraping sound of a bail, and perhaps a sparse, tense musical score to accentuate the race’s momentum. The quality of these audio cues would have made or broken the immersion, a fact true for any racing game aiming to simulate a visceral experience.

Reception & Legacy

Critical and Commercial Reception

The reception for Longboard: Stunts and Tricks was, for all practical purposes, non-existent. The MobyGames page confirms there are zero critic reviews and zero player reviews. It was collected by only 4 players on the platform, and it has no MobyScore. This is a game that was released into the world and met with a profound and utter silence.

It was not a commercial failure in the traditional sense, as it likely had minuscule expectations; it was simply undiscovered. It was a drop in the ocean of Steam releases, lacking the marketing muscle, streamer appeal, or word-of-mouth buzz to ever find an audience. A telling detail is the May 8, 2019, re-release where the publisher changed from Coffee-Powered Games to Art of Adventures, perhaps an attempt to rebrand or find a new publishing partner to inject life into the project. This effort, too, failed to garner attention.

Lasting Influence and Historical Position

The legacy of Longboard: Stunts and Tricks is that it has none. It did not influence the genre. It did not spawn a sequel. It is not remembered fondly as a hidden gem. Its historical significance is purely archaeological. It serves as a perfect case study for the reality of the modern indie game market: for every breakout success story, there are thousands of titles like this that vanish on arrival.

It exists now only as a database entry, a set of metadata that hints at a project that once was. It is a monument to the sheer volume of content produced in the digital age and a sobering reminder that creating a game is only half the battle—getting anyone to play it is the other.

Conclusion

Longboard: Stunts and Tricks is a fascinating blank space in video game history. It is a game defined not by what it is, but by what it represents: the ambition of a small developer, the accessibility of modern tools, and the brutal indifference of the marketplace. Based on a deep analysis of its available data, it was a game with a clear, focused vision—to simulate the thrill of downhill longboard racing—that almost certainly failed to execute on that vision with a level of polish or innovation necessary to capture anyone’s attention.

Its complete lack of critical or player engagement renders any final verdict on its quality speculative. However, its total obscurity is itself the most powerful review. It was not a bad game; it was an irrelevant one. It arrived, it existed, and it departed without a whisper. For historians and enthusiasts, it remains a curious footnote, a digital ghost ship sailing the endless streams of Steam. For everyone else, it is a game that might as well have never existed at all, a definitive testament to the fact that in the vast ecosystem of video games, even a title powered by coffee isn’t guaranteed to wake anyone up.