Stop at Tim Hortons a feature of Canadian-themed skateboarding video game demo

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A Canadian developer created a brief video game demo that involves a skateboarder executing jumps and tricks on his way to the local Tim Hortons.

AI proponent Mitchell Hynes borrowed a page from stereotypical Canadian wintertime experiences and jammed them into a 15-year-old plus video game.

“What if skate 3 was set in north Ontario,” Hynes asked his followers on X last week. … “Yall will be the first to see a functioning Tim Hortons simulated in the Skate 3 engine natively.”

Hynes certainly accomplished what he said he set out to do with this winterscape.

Some of his followers seemed to think this was the developer’s take on a northern Ontario winter, complete with a snowmobile, but Hynes is from Newfoundland. Heck, it could be any province playing out in his narrative. Skate 3 came out in 2010.

“Minus the Tims, this looks like how my mother described growing up in Sudbury,” one ‘X’ user.

“Funny I based it on my time in Timmins/Lab City,” Hynes said in response. 

Game was reverse-engineered

The entire video lasts approximately 90 seconds and, as a bonus, Canadian warbler Neil Young provides the background music with his song ‘Helpless’ from the 1970 album Deja Vu by Crosby, Still, Nash and Young. 

Hynes reverse-engineered the game and reformatted it to run on Bevy. According to the website, Bevy is a “refreshingly simple data-driven game engine built in Rust. It is free and open source forever under your choice of the MIT or Apache 2.0 licenses.”

Developers use Rust to create 2D and 3D video games. 

Hynes must be credited for this dedication to the project. He says he spent “more than two years reverse engineering Skate 3 and building the tools needed to understand and work with it. That meant countless hours digging through undocumented file formats, animation data, and game interaction systems, then testing those discoveries in the original game.” 

When the skateboarder completes his mission and skates into the parking lot at the Tims, the only faux pas of the experience, besides waiting in line behind three people for a coffee, occurs when he executes a bunny hop onto the countertop, but immediately does a face plant onto the floor.  

ganderson@postmedia.com

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