At this point, it’s fair to say snowboarding’s starting to look like a video game. If you haven’t felt that yet, just wait for Milano Cortina 2026 — it’s going to feel like some real-life SSX 3 button mashing. That has us thinking... the amount of spins and airtime happening right now used to only exist in your bedroom, and hopefully that unzips you to a simpler time. A time when your biggest responsibility was stomping a backside 2340 in Metro City before school, and when you shut off the PlayStation or Xbox, all those wild tricks shut off too.
But now? Shit’s real. Those once-fictional tricks live at any given slopestyle course or pipe, and instead of unlocking new characters and stacking 1200 XP, riders are stacking FIS points. Wild world we’re in.
And for the sake of this caption, you could say some of this traces back to Sage, one of the first guys who made the “impossible” look doable. Maybe some glazing going on there, but when he won Olympic gold in Sochi in 2014 (pretty sure he did the first 1620 Japan there?), it felt like everything had just started to shift a bit. Now that same run can be done by a 16-year-old who’s spent enough time on an airbag last summer, so maybe this project is a nod to the new reality we’re living in. When I talked to Sage at his premiere in Boulder last weekend, that sounded like exactly the point. Even he didn’t think snowboarding would end up where it’s at.
And that’s why Eternal Descent hits so perfectly right now. Right time, right people, and the right amount of SSX-level insanity that still values style over 1200 XP. Sage and Jerm built an SSX-influenced world that mirrors everything happening in snowboarding (the progression, the chaos, the creativity) but turned it into something a bit more intentional. It's stylized like a game, shot with real vision, and still rooted in everything else that keeps snowboarding from becoming a physics experiment. Even in an era of video-game tricks, style still leads the way exactly where it should be happening: the Hokkaido backcountry, some Jackson booters, and hefty Alaskan spines.
Thanks Sage, needed someone who could push things forward without losing the soul of it all. Reeeeling it back with intention.
Featuring: Sage Kotsenburg, Judd Henkes, Dustin Craven, Rene Rinnekangas, Sebbe De Buck, Nils Mindnich, Zak Hale
