A meeting with Shahid Ahmad, then the champion of all things indie at Sony, put the pieces in place, and OlliOlli found its home on the PlayStation Vita. Tying the game to an underperforming but much-loved piece of hardware no doubt helped its visibility - with a relative lack of competition and lots of people willing to march for games that pledged exclusivity, it's doubtful OlliOlli would have had such a high profile elsewhere. Still, the OlliOlli that finally made its way to release was very different to the one that was first conceived; initially, it was an infinite runner.
"It was randomly generated," says John. "I don't mean procedural, I mean random, and they were unfair at times. We had a programmer join, and he was trying to recreate that stuff and hacking it, and we couldn't do procedural generation the way we wanted to. So I built a level editor in Multimedia Fusion that could export a text file you could then open a level on the Vita with - and it was a premade level just to test things so we can test the mechanics."