Ludography
3Xtreme cover

1999 · 989 Studios · Racing · Sports

3Xtreme

PlayStation exclusive

Huge air, phat moves, and sick tricks!

Released
21 April 1999
Platforms
PlayStation
Genres
RacingSports
Developers
989 Studios
Publishers
989 Studios
Series
Xtreme
Modes
Single-player
Perspective
Third person
Country
United States
Age ratings
ESRB E
Languages
English
Entry
#3 in Xtreme

About

3Xtreme is a 1999 combat racing video game developed and published by 989 Sports for the PlayStation. As with 2Xtreme, 3Xtreme contains skateboarding, skating, and cycling options to reach the goal before opponents, with the optional ability for offensive physical attacks.

Keywords

  • bmx
  • skateboarding
  • split-screen multiplayer
  • grind
  • in-game advertising
  • playstation underground

Media

The articlegameplay, story, development, reception

Gameplay

In 3Xtreme, the players take part in specific events using skateboards, BMX or inline skates. With the simplistic nature of each stage, the focus is on doing tricks instead of pure driving. There are more than 22 courses, mostly taken from 2Xtreme. They include parks, subways, mountains and islands.

Each trick, for which Dave Mirra and Andy MacDonald did motion-capture, can be linked into combos. Some of them are rail slides, board grabs and 360 degree turns. 3Xtreme rewards doing trick moves as good as possible by giving points, judging by how well they were performed. They can be used afterwards to upgrade the vehicles.

Development

3Xtreme was developed by 989 Sports, with Ed Loonam as the product manager. The idea was to incorporate the speed pace from ESPN Extreme Games, while keeping some fighting elements from 2Xtreme. Unlike the previous games in the series which used sprites, every in-game object was fully polygonal and all tracks were designed to be longer. The vehicles were based on real-life models from several manufacturers, such as Trek Bicycle Corporation, K2 Sports, GT Bicycles and Tum Yeto.

Sony spent millions of dollars marketing the game.

Reception

The game received unfavorable reviews according to the review aggregation website GameRankings. Next Generation said that the game was "yet another formula 'don't do much for the sequel, because they're gonna buy it anyway' production."

Releases by platformdates and regions as published

PlatformReleasedRegions
PlayStation31 March 1999North America

In the same series

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Collections3 collections

Genres

Platform libraries

Description adapted from its source, CC BY-SA 4.0.