SURF LIKE SLATER

In the middle of the day, in a big glass building in Santa Monica, past security clearances and passwords, the lights are off and the curtains are drawn; a hundred pale faces are illuminated only by the flickering of computer terminals. Employees creep through the dark from one cubicle to the next through the dark past barely-visible posters of Spiderman, the X-Men and other super heroes. Treyarch Studios is the last place in the world you'd expect to find anything related to surfing.

But deep in this cubicle matrix, name plates are shaped like surfboards. Next to Spider Man, there are Bruce Irons and Rob Machado posters, and a white board with numbers and geometric figures drawn next to surf spots like Kirra, Sebastian, and Maverick's. From the doorway of an office where Rob Machado himself is testing the game, I watch as two programmers with thick Asian accents carry on an impossible debate over the contours of Teahupoo's tube.

Treyarch is the developer for Kelly Slater's Pro Surfer, and in their shadowy Santa Monica offices, just a stone's throw from Activision headquarters, programmers have been analyzing the difference between a Tom Curren and Kelly Slater bottom turn for five weeks. Computer programmers sit around watching Taylor Steele videos, mapping your favorite surfers' styles, airbrushes, and trunk/rashguard combinations. They study the physics of water texture, clarity and color at our most well-known surf spots. Things you know intuitively from spending years of your life lying on a surfboard, 12 programmers and eight artists are trying to understand and then articulate in repeating patterns of ones and zeros.

Two thirds of disc space on Kelly Slater's Pro Surfer is devoted to water, and it's comforting to know that they're concerned. Outsiders usually always get water wrong. While the rest of the world was sobbing over Kate Winslett's romantic plea for Leo to "come back," surfers everywhere were crying foul on Titanic's inconsistent water texture. With several real surfers on the development staff, Activision and Treyarch are rigorously trying to avoid the water faux pas, and they've developed hyper-real water based on polygons and physics that has already managed to impress the video-game industry.

At the recent Electronic Entertainment Expo (E-3), the video-game industry's only trade show, a massive and head-spinning event, Activision was awarded "Most Technologically Impressive" for their mastery of water in Slater's game. With E-3 being the one shot to generate industry hype, Activision's award is a huge coup.

Watching Rob test the game in the caverns at Treyarch, the water doesn't look real, but it is mesmerizing. In fact, that's exactly how they want it.

"Video games, even more than movies, try to create suspension of disbelief," explains Slater Producer Eric Koch (pronounced "cook"). "We don't try and replicate reality. Reality is far more complex than you can imagine."

So instead of altering reality, the goal, it seems, is to merely enhance it to a degree that makes game play fun, while keeping close ties to the actual experience. Initially, Slater's game was supposed to be similar to Tony Hawk's, with skate-inspired surf tricks. But after receiving feedback on gaming web sites, Activision has focused on making the game unique to surfing, while using Hawk inspired "intuitive controls."

In Kelly Slater's Pro Surfer, surfing ability is enhanced but physical laws are not suspended. The entire experience, from the movement of the water and rider to the nonlinear sequence of events, is a supernatural reality, but not an over-complicated one. As advertised, the controls are easy to learn, but difficult to master. They're intuitive.

Probably the biggest accomplishment for the Slater game, however, is the fact that, like surfing, no two waves are ever the same. If there's one thing that all surfers agree on, it's that in real surfing, you never ride the same wave twice. To mimic this, programmers built in combinations of sections, conditions and tidal variations that make it nearly impossible to ever surf the same wave. This is the single biggest difference from previous surf games and from Tony Hawk's game, where static objects have a limited number of configurations.

This means that, when the game's released this fall, people in Iowa and throughout the world will have the opportunity to taste surfing's "best things." If the game's theory is correct, hoards of people will buy it for this reason, and Activision will make ungodly sums of money. But beyond that, the video game manufacturer will have produced something that, for 40 years, has eluded the surf industry, Hollywood and artificial wave makers alike: a delivery agent for the surf lifestyle that isn't geographically or athletically biased. Anyone with a Playstation, X-Box or Gameboy Advance system will have the chance to "know the feeling."