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[edit]Extreme sports enters into the mainstream

SSX Blur on the Wii console
At the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century, extreme sport video games began to appear more frequently.
In 1996, two early snowboarding games were released: Namco's Alpine Surfer in the arcades,^[75] and the UEP Systems game Cool Boarders for the PlayStationconsole.^[76] The following year, Square's popular role-playing video game, Final Fantasy VII, included a snowboarding minigame that was later released as an indepdendent snowboarding game, Final Fantasy VII Snowboarding, for mobile phones.^[77] In 2000, SSX was released. Based around boardercross, the game featured fast downhill races, avoiding various objects whilst using others to perform jumps and increase the player's speed.^[78]
In 1997, Sega released one of the first mainstream skateboarding games, Top Skater,^[79] in the arcades, where it introduced a skateboard controller interface.^[80] The following year saw the release of the console skateboarding game Street Sk8er, developed by Atelier Double and published by Electronic Arts. In 1999, the subgenre was further popularized by Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, an arcade-like skateboarding game where players were challenged to execute elaborate tricks or collect a series of elements hidden throughout the level.^[79]

[edit]Sports gaming becomes big business

On 13 December 2004, Electronic Arts began a string of deals that granted exclusive rights to several prominent sports organizations, starting with the NFL.^[81] This was quickly followed with two deals in January 2005 securing rights to the AFL^[82] and ESPN licenses.^[83] This was a particularly hard blow to Sega, the previous holder of the ESPN license, who had already been affected by EA's NFL deal. As the market for football brands was being quickly taken by EA, Take-Two Interactive responded by contacting the Major League Baseball Players Association and signing a deal that granted exclusive third-party major-league baseball rights;^[84] a deal not as restrictive, as first-party projects were still allowed. The NBA was then approached by several developers, but declined to enter into an exclusivity agreement, instead granting long-term licenses to Electronic Arts, Take-Two Interactive, Midway Games, Sony, and Atari.^[85] In April 2005, EA furthered its hold on American football licensing by securing rights to all NCAA brands.^[86]