[In the latest in a series of Gamasutra-exclusive bonus material originally to be included in Bill Loguidice and Matt Barton’s new book Vintage Games: An Insider Look at the History of Grand Theft Auto, Super Mario, and the Most Influential Games of All Time, the duo presents a history of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, the game that popularized a niche genre and sparked a host of imitators in the early part of this decade.]

Screenshot from Atari’s 720 Degrees arcade game.

Extreme sports video games have a long and storied history, culminating with the first Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater in 1999, which ramped the genre to superstar status. As we’ve seen, nearly every game in this series has predecessors, and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater is no different.

Games like 720 Degrees, a 1986 arcade skateboarding game from Atari, and Skate or Die!, a 1987 multiplatform home release from Electronic Arts, made scores of gamers happy, but it was Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater that would take the genre successfully into the realm of 3D[1], offering unparalleled levels of control and fluid motion so critical to such games, in turn spawning a whole slew of me-too products that wanted to outperform and be more extreme than skateboarding icon Tony Hawk himself.

Screenshot from Skate or Die!, Commodore 64 version.

Of course, extreme sports — also referred to as action or adventure sports — are not limited to the skateboard. The term can represent any over-the-top or dangerous sporting activity, which is particularly at home in the world of video games.

From the early Olympic sports video games, culminating with Epyx’s multiplatform California Games (1987), which featured skateboarding, freestyle footbag, surfing, roller skating, flying disc, and BMX minigames, to the classic NBA Jam (1993) and NFL Blitz (1997) series of highly stylized and simplified arcade sports video games, there has been no shortage of compelling, action-packed alternatives to traditional sports gaming.

What Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, which has now generated $1 billion in sales across the course of the series,  added was an extraordinary level of realism to the over-the-top antics that resonated with many players who were turned off by the overly competitive nature of the previous games. By making it about technique over style, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater expanded its audience to far more players than any other game of its type before.

Screenshot from the surfing event in California Games, Commodore 64 version.

Box back for the Sony PlayStation version of Midway’s NBA Jam Tournament Edition (1994).

Screenshot from the arcade version of Midway’s NFL Blitz (1997), which put a more violent twist on the over-the-top antics of the successful NBA Jam formula.

[1] Sega’s hit Top Skater (aka, Top Skater Sega Skateboarding) arcade game from 1997, which featured a skateboard controller and railings as part of its oversized cabinet, was one of the first 3D skateboarding simulations, but was as much about racing as it was about performing stylish tricks.

Despite the eventual release of mostly mediocre home skateboarding controllers thanks to the popularity of games like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Top Skater never received a home port. 

The Gamasutra Job Board is the most diverse, active and established board of its kind for the video game industry!

Here is just one of the many, many positions being advertised right now.

Location: Renton, Washington

At Wizards of the Coast, we connect people around the world through play and imagination. From our genre defining games like Magic: The Gathering® and Dungeons & Dragons® to our growing multiverse, we continue to innovate and build new ways to foster friendship and connection. That’s where you come in!

Are you a veteran software designer with experience developing and supporting a live game service?

The Magic: The Gathering Arena team is looking for an experienced engineer to help manage and direct the engineering team who builds and maintains our game client in Unity. In close collaboration with designers, artists, and other engineers, you’ll be one of the main drivers of designs and decisions within the team.

What you’ll do

• Directly manage, guide and supervise a team of software developers while contributing to the entire project
• Design and implement solutions for Magic: The Gathering Arena in alignment with architectural designs and program needs
• Provide consultation on sophisticated projects as a top level contributor/specialist
• Communicate and iterate on technical designs and decisions with the team and help troubleshoot and resolve technical problems as they arise on production environments
• Use your experience to grasp issues quickly and make critical judgments in the absence of complete information
• Work with a variety of other departments to build technical requirements

What you bring

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or 5 years of experience in professional software development.
• 6 years of total job experience
• Experience leading and mentoring effective teams.
• Experience with front-end software development.
• Proven understanding and experience working on client/server architectures.
• Strong coding, debugging and problem-solving skills and the ability to write readable, maintainable code.
• Strong communication and teamwork with diverse groups of people in various roles.
• Software development experience with multiple platforms (Windows, iOS, Android, etc.)
• Sound knowledge of software engineering, software engineering methodologies, and the impact of early decisions on later development stages of software projects.

We are an equal opportunity / affirmative action employer

The above is intended to describe the general content of and the requirements for satisfactory performance in this position. It is not to be construed as an exhaustive statement of the duties, responsibilities, or requirements of the position.

We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment.

Interested? Apply now.

Whether you’re just starting out, looking for something new, or just seeing what’s out there, the Gamasutra Job Board is the place where game developers move ahead in their careers.

Gamasutra’s Job Board is the most diverse, most active, and most established board of its kind in the video game industry, serving companies of all sizes, from indie to triple-A.

Looking for a new job? Get started here. Are you a recruiter looking for talent? Post jobs here.

Problem: Given a JSON object. How to pretty print it from the shell/terminal/command line using a Python one-liner?

Minimal Example: You have given the following JSON object:

{"Alice": "24", "Bob": "28"}

And you want to get the following print output:

{ "Alice": "24", "Bob": "28"

}

How to accomplish this using a Python one-liner?

Method 0: Python Program + json.dump

The default way to accomplish this in a Python script is to import the json library to solve the issue:

Exercise: Execute the script. What’s the output? Now change the number of indentation spaces to 2!

However, what if you want to run this from your operating system terminal as a one-liner command? Let’s dive into the four best ways!

Method 1: Terminal / Shell / Command Line with Echo + Pipe + json.tool

The echo command prints the JSON to the standard output. This is then piped as standard input to the json.tool program that pretty prints the JSON object to the standard output:

echo '{"Alice": "24", "Bob": "28"}' | python -m json.tool

The output is the prettier:

{ "Alice": "24", "Bob": "28"

}

The pipe operator | redirects the output to the standard input of the Python script.

Method 2: Use a File as Input with json.tool

An alternative is the simple:

python -m json.tool file.json

This method is best if you have stored your JSON object in the file.json file. If the file contains the same data, the output is the same, too:

{ "Alice": "24", "Bob": "28"

}

Method 3: Use Web Resource with json.tool

If your JSON file resides on a given URL https://example.com, you’ll best use the following one-liner:

curl https://example.com/ | python -m json.tool

Again, assuming the same JSON object residing on the server, the output is the same:

{ "Alice": "24", "Bob": "28"

}

Method 4: Use jq

This is the simplest way but it assumes that you have the jq program installed on your machine. You can download jq here and also read about the excellent quick-start resources here.

Let’s dive into the code you can run in your shell:

jq <<< '{ "foo": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum" }'

{ "bar": "ipsum", "foo": "lorem"

}

The <<< operator passes the string on the right to the standard input of the command on the left. You can learn more about this special pipe operator in this SO thread.

While this method is not a Python script, it still works beautifully when executed from a Linux or MacOS shell or the Windows Powershell / command line.

Python One-Liners Book

Python programmers will improve their computer science skills with these useful one-liners.

Python One-Liners will teach you how to read and write “one-liners”: concise statements of useful functionality packed into a single line of code. You’ll learn how to systematically unpack and understand any line of Python code, and write eloquent, powerfully compressed Python like an expert.

The book’s five chapters cover tips and tricks, regular expressions, machine learning, core data science topics, and useful algorithms. Detailed explanations of one-liners introduce key computer science concepts and boost your coding and analytical skills. You’ll learn about advanced Python features such as list comprehension, slicing, lambda functions, regular expressions, map and reduce functions, and slice assignments. You’ll also learn how to:

•  Leverage data structures to solve real-world problems, like using Boolean indexing to find cities with above-average pollution
•  Use NumPy basics such as array, shape, axis, type, broadcasting, advanced indexing, slicing, sorting, searching, aggregating, and statistics
•  Calculate basic statistics of multidimensional data arrays and the K-Means algorithms for unsupervised learning
•  Create more advanced regular expressions using grouping and named groups, negative lookaheads, escaped characters, whitespaces, character sets (and negative characters sets), and greedy/nongreedy operators
•  Understand a wide range of computer science topics, including anagrams, palindromes, supersets, permutations, factorials, prime numbers, Fibonacci numbers, obfuscation, searching, and algorithmic sorting

By the end of the book, you’ll know how to write Python at its most refined, and create concise, beautiful pieces of “Python art” in merely a single line.

Get your Python One-Liners Now!!

Apple CEO Tim Cook this week reaped nearly $132 million after acquiring and immediately selling 560,000 restricted stock units meted out as time- and performance-based awards.

The Fedora Project is changing the default file system for desktop variants, including Fedora Workstation, Fedora KDE, and more, for the first time since Fedora 11. Btrfs will replace ext4 as the default filesystem in Fedora 33. The Change is code complete, and has been testable in Rawhide as the default file system since early July. The Fedora Workstation working group and QA team have organized a test week from Monday, Aug 31, 2020 through Monday, Sep 07, 2020. Refer to the wiki page for links to the test images you’ll need to participate. Read below for details.

How does a test week work?

A test week is an event where anyone can help make sure changes in Fedora work well in an upcoming release. Fedora community members often participate, and the public is welcome at these events. If you’ve never contributed before, this is a perfect way to get started.

To contribute, you only need to be able to do the following things:

• Download test materials, which include some large files
• Read and follow directions step by step

The wiki page for the kernel test day has a lot of good information on what and how to test. After you’ve done some testing, you can log your results in the test day web application. If you’re available on or around the day of the event, please do some testing and report your results.

Happy testing, and we hope to see you during the test week!

The imminent re-release of Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles Remastered Edition has got us looking back over the long-running and celebrated (and confusingly numbered in the West) Final Fantasy series. Although the entire saga began on Nintendo’s Famicom, there was a long while from the mid-’90s that the mainline games weren’t to be found on Nintendo consoles; remakes on handhelds, yes, but not the new numbered entries.

Thankfully, the situation has been rectified somewhat thanks to numerous re-releases on Switch of games previously only available elsewhere. Although there are a few entries unaccounted for (XIII, MMORPGs XI and XIV, and XV in its full form), Nintendo gamers can now enjoy the majority of the series. With that in mind, we thought a ranking of all the mainline entries was in order, and we’d like your help. Just what are the best Final Fantasy games on Nintendo systems?

Below you’ll find the candidates; registered Nintendo Life users can click on the stars and rate any (or all) of the games out of 10. If you’ve previously rated these games–excellent!–you can just put your feet up. Much like our Top 50 platform polls, the resulting ranking (which we’ll publish soon) will be created from the database of NL User Ratings and is therefore fluid and subject to change, even after publication. If you’re in the middle of a Final Fantasy game and don’t want to rate it yet, no sweat – you can add your score to the game at any time in the future and it will still count and potentially influence the ranking.

We’ve dispensed with the bewildering host of spin-offs, crossovers, remakes and more that form one of gaming’s biggest juggernaut franchises – just the mainline games today, folks. To keep things simpler in voting terms, we’ve only included one version of the games to pick from below. Final Fantasy II, for example, is the Famicom original rather than the GBA’s dual pack of Final Fantasy I & II: Dawn of Souls. While remade versions might have altered the base games–sometimes rather substantially–those differences (and preferences) are ripe material for discussion when the results are in.

We’ve also included the ‘demade’ Pocket Edition of Final Fantasy XV; we’re under no illusions and don’t expect it to rank highly, but it’s the only version available on Nintendo platformers. The nature of the ‘voting’ here makes it easy to discount from the final ranking if it doesn’t qualify in your book.

So, big swords at the ready! Let’s get rating…

Rate each Final Fantasy game:

Click the stars below to rate out of 10 each Final Fantasy game you’ve played:

Thanks for rating! We’ll be finding out the results in the near future, but remember: much like our platform Top 50s, the list here is fluid, so even if you miss out on voting before the results are revealed, you can still influence the ranking after publication.