Snowboarding Games
Snowboarding is a very popular winter sport that has caught the fancy of old and young alike and is making waves in the world of recreational games.
It attained so much popularity in a short time thanks to the thrills, excitement, exhilaration and adrenaline surge it guarantees, that it was included in the WINTER OLYMPIC SPORT in 1998 due to popular demand.
This is a game that was developed in the USA in the sixties and attained tremendous fan following by the seventies. In 1965 Sherman Poppen developed the first snowboard and SNURFER was the nickname adopted by it. The SNURFER in its rudimentary stage was basically nothing more than a scaled down version of a skateboard.
Later on big manufacturing companies entered the field and competition for manufacturing high quality snowboards hottened up. Some of the leading manufacturers are GNU (founded by Mike Olson), SIMS (founded by Tom Sims), BURTON (founded by Jake Burton) and Dimitrije Milovich.
With the advent of high quality snowboarding equipment that incorporated cutting edge technology, the sport became a serious business, started attracting professionals from all walks of life and from all ages and the first WORLD CUP SNOWBOARDING GAMES was hosted at Austria in Zurs.
A new body for regulating the game and stipulating the rules and hosting events worldwide was established in 1994 and was named INTERNATIONAL SNOWBOARD ASSOCIATION or ISA. Because of initial safety concerns, snowboarding was permitted in only 7% of all ski resorts but the number leaped up to an overwhelming 97% ski resorts worldwide.
The game is now aided by equipment such as rails and trainers to increase its professional capacities.
The game has also witnessed the rise of multi-million dollar industries and sporting events such as the WINTER OLYMPICS, WINTER X GAMES, SKAKEDOWN, CHEVROLET REVOLUTION TOUR, THE CHEVROLET U.S. SNOWBOARDING GRAND PRIX, THE U.S. OPEN, THE WEST COAST INVITATIONAL, RACE TO THE CUP, VANS CUP etc which testify to the phenomenal popularity of the game and there are even snowboarding video games like XBOX and PS2 doing their rounds in contemporary times.
They do their bit to promote the game and a whopping 1.58 million snowboards flew off the shelves in the year 1998.
Snowboarding games are most popular in the snowy summits of Europe, Canada and USA. Even Australia which experiences no snowfall at all houses exponentially large numbers of snowboarding enthusiasts. Most of the tourists who come to visit America are snowboarding buffs!