About the history of the Trials series and it's most recent iteration Trials Evolution Gold Edition

From PC to Xbox and back, RedLynx have spent a decade recreating trials riding on the small screen - what’s next for the team?

For a man who’s built his career on racing games, Antti Ilvessuo doesn’t get on a bike much these days. After all, RedLynx studio’s and creative director has to be around to make the games the sport’s fans play. “No, we are definitely not all riders ourselves,” he jokes. “That would be madness, and a huge insurance risk for the game.”

There’s a lot riding on Ilvessuo. He’s in charge of a team of 45 at RedLynx in Helsinki, hard at work at the next instalment in the hit motorbike trials riding series, Trials Evolution: Gold Edition, which hits shelves in just a few days’ time.

With its launch, Antti and his brother and co-founder Atte will have come full circle: from humble beginnings with a tiny web game on PC, they’ve since been to Xbox and back, racking up millions of sales along the way. With Gold Edition, they’ve finally returned to the PC, where it all started.

“We always wanted to bring Trials Evolution and Trials HD to the PC platform,” Ilvessuo tells Red Bull UK. “That’s why our tagline for this game is 'Trials is coming home.' We know many PC gamers were upset that the games had been up until now Xbox 360 exclusives, but the realities of being a small, independent developer is that you sometimes need to make sacrifices in the short term...That's how we've managed to stay around for 13 years, and we really think now that PC gamers are getting this loving, special edition, they will agree it was worth the wait.”

The Trials games started life as simple Flash games for web browsers - the sort you’d find kids slacking off class and playing in IT lessons - but have transformed and cranked up the action in the years since.

The series has a simple premise: you race against the clock on a 2D course stuffed with obstacles from ramps to massive tractor tyres and even exploding barrels. It’s simple in theory, yet the series’ hard-as-nails difficulty is anything but, ( Check out television jokers/stuntmen CKY failing hard and throwing their controllers against the wall) – gamers still come back for more though. Trials HD on the Xbox 360 alone has rung up more than two million sales since launch in 2009.



Evolution, the 2012 sequel, stuffs even more trials riding into the cramped confines of an Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA) download game. For the Gold Edition release on PC, RedLynx is also adding in all the single player tracks and skill games from the original Trials HD - even the in-game editor’s been given a PC makeover.

“Our goal in Gold Edition is to preserve the experience from XBLA completely,” says Ilvessuo. “We have our own set of leader boards, we have our own servers to run Track Central where you can download thousands of user-created tracks made by other players, we have servers to handle multiplayer matchmaking. In fact, everything you can do in the XBLA game you will be able to do in the PC game.”

“But we like to say Gold Edition is the biggest Trials game ever - it's not just the Evolution XBLA game, it also includes all of the dozens of tracks and skill games from the previous game, Trials HD. That’s more than 120 tracks total across both games.”

RedLynx have even ported over all the online modes, and added some extra tools in too. There’s a “meaningful online connection,” explains Ilvessuo. “You can always check on your friends, share content through YouTube, and see where you stand in the competition.”



And just to make sure the game stays true to the spirit of trials - if not real world physics - they’ve worked with top riders. “We’ve worked with a few riders in the past, like Finnish FMX pro Jussi Seljas, who talked to us about how bikes handle...and gave us a lot of important feedback on our games, throughout.” He even pulled off a few backflips on video for a game trailer.

RedLynx have come a long way in the time since the first Trials game. “The game began as a free little Java game, ten years before free-to-play games became the standard in the industry - it’s like watching your precocious little child grow up,” says Ilvessuo.

That jump from Flash game to high end Xbox 360 title was made easier by all the other platforms they’ve worked on along the way, from handhelds to home consoles - in 2011, the team released MotoHeroz, a monster truck race for Nintendo’s hit Wii console.

“The movement from browser-based to the Xbox 360 was quite a leap, but there were a few important stepping stones that bridged the gap. For example, we did a number of large team projects for portable devices - Nokia phones, Nintendo DS, and Sony PSP - before we moved to consoles.”

That hard work paid off. After more than ten years as an indie, RedLynx caught the attention of big name publishers: Ubisoft, the company behind the Assassin’s Creed franchise, bought the studio in late 2011. Gaming history’s littered with too many stories of small studios ruined by their major label benefactors, but Ilvessuo says it’s proven to be the perfect partnership.

“It's a fantastic fit really,” he says. “Our company was founded by my brother Atte and myself, and Ubisoft was founded by the five Guillemot brothers, so it’s really like joining a larger family.”

Gamers seem to agree: they’re still playing the now five year old Trials 2, and still uploading their own custom made courses. Now that RedLynx are bringing their track editor back to PC, they’re hoping even more trials fan will get involved.



Trials Evolution boasts an incredibly powerful track editor.

“That's the reason we included so many powerful tools within the editor, things like triggers, physics logic, independent actors, controllable cameras,” says Ilvessuo. “There’s some truly mad stuff that has been made by our user community on the Xbox 360 side, so it's going to be amazing to see what the PC community can do. The editor that comes with the game can now be controlled by a mouse and keyboard rather than just a controller, so that could open things up for a lot of people, as well as the ability to mod and do things on a PC that you normally couldn't on an Xbox.”

Gamers have turned Trials on Xbox into everything from a pinball game on two wheels to an Angry Birds clone, so with even more freedom, expect even more insane ideas from fans. “It’s the exact same editor that our own level designer guys use to create all the wild rides and fantastic finishes in the Trials tracks,” he says. “We hold nothing back from the user.”

One thing Ilvessuo does hold back on: what’s next from RedLynx. He won’t be drawn on whether the team is planning a next-generation Trials game for consoles like the Sony PlayStation 4.

“Right now we're just focused on Trials Evolution: Gold Edition,” he says. “There's a lot to do with that one, get it ready for launch, support it afterwards, things like that. Then we're looking to do some fun competitions and really help support Trials Evolution on both PC and Xbox.”

Still, now that they’re part of the establishment, they’ve got more time than ever to work on what’s next. “Ubisoft really keeps its focus on creative games, and they relieve us of a lot of pressures and burdens that take up a lot of time for indie game studios - things like accounting...Now we can just concentrate on making great games.”

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http://www.redbull.co.uk/cs/Satellite/en_UK/Article/The-Trials-Of-RedLynx-Bringing-Motorcycles-To-021243328227841