place. All of the characters' moves were created with motion capture. Tommy Hilfiger outfits and Lamar snowboards appear throughout 1080° as product placement. 1080° soundtrack of "techno and beats" with "thrashy, vocals" was composed by Kenta Nagata. 1080° development took place from April or May 1997 into early 1998. The game was released on 28 February 1998 in Japan and on 1 April in North America. Nintendo prioritized 1080° for Japanese release over other Nintendo 64 games because they wanted it out while there was still snow. Nintendo delayed the game's European release because they hoped to boost sales with a winter release; 1080° was eventually released on 30 November, 1998 in Europe and the PAL region. Reception 1080° Snowboarding received "generally favorable reviews", just two points shy of "universal acclaim", according to review aggregator website Metacritic. In Japan, Famitsu gave it a score of 31 out of 40. Nintendo Power gave the Japanese import a favorable review, over a month before it was released Stateside. It was called "one of the best values in both sports and racing gaming" by Josh Smith of GameSpot. 1080° Snowboarding has been perceived to be a leader among snowboarding titles at the time. Edge hailed it as the "most convincing video game emulation of the snowboarding experience so far" with an "atmosphere of sobriety" unlike any other Nintendo game at the time. The game's graphics were of the highest quality for the Nintendo 64 at the time. Smith praised general aspects of the game's graphics such as their crispness, detail, smoothness, and lack of polygon dropout. Reviewers praised the game's camera use, the game's "very solid" physics model, the impression of racers' speed, and the game's snow effects (sun reflected in the snow as appropriate, and fluffy snow and packed snow appeared and behaved differently). Graphical faults included occasional pop-up, misplaced shadows, and lag when racers passed through on-track trees; these problems were generally identified as minor. Although writing a positive review, Edge found faults in the game's AI, saying the game suffered from "cheating" CPU opponents. They criticized the AI's simplicity and ability to quickly catch up to the player near the end of a race; they also noted the AI's "limited series of predetermined routes" and the possibility of a player learning where and when an AI falls over, "offering an opportunity to pass [the computer], but conveying little satisfaction with