Hot tubs, couches and thousands of people take over Sumner for 10th year of festival
Couches took over the pathways of Sumner, hot tubs were parked up next to the beach, and surfers from around the world hit the waves for the 10th annual Single Fin Mingle competition.
Surfing heats for the 88 longboard competitors began yesterday, but for many, it’s merely the underlay for the four day entertainment extravaganza that features art exhibitions, a film festival, live music and an entire street party today that closes Nayland St.
About 4000 people are expected to attend the festival over the weekend, bringing an expected boost of at least $100,000 to the Christchurch beach town, said event founder and director Ambrose McNeill.
Local Sumner longboard surfers Nic Todd and Grant Cochrane soaked and reheated their bodies in the beachside hot tubs after their first surf of the event.
The pair have been involved in the Single Fin Mingle since it began in 2015 – Todd even won the inaugural event.
“Back when it was all local [surfers],” Todd recalled.
The event has since “grown tenfold” with the introduction of “world class” surfers from Australia, Japan, the United States, Spain, England and France.
“[Sumner’s] not a famous wave by any stretch of the imagination so it's pretty cool that they come and we get to showcase our little community,” Todd said.
“It’s a great longboard wave because it's not heavy breaking, and it gets good shape,” Cochrane added.
Cochrane has been surfing throughout his entire 67 years, and said this weekend was the “pinnacle” event for loggers (surfers that ride typically longer surfboards) in New Zealand.
International Kalina Jones travelled from Hawaii for her first Single Fin Mingle, which also doubled as her first time in New Zealand.
The event revolves around longboards – surfboards over 2.74m long, with one fin – based on the traditional 1960s style. It’s a way of surfing that’s made a comeback, Jones said.
“That's what people were riding when they started surfing and then boards got more progressive, and now we're taking it back to the old school days surfing single fin, heavy boards, all about style.”
The event’s creation was centred around livening up McNeill’s hometown that “was feeling a little bit sleepy,” he said.
“I was watching these great events happening overseas and I really wanted to see something like that happen here... we've got great waves, a great village and a great community.”
Word spread, and now it’s regarded as “one of the world's most prestigious longboarding events,” McNeill said. It’s entry by invite, so each talented longboarder is hand-picked, but with more activities also happening off the water, there’s room for everyone, he said.
“It's not limited to a group of surfers, it really is for anyone to come and check out whether you walk by and have a coffee, listen to some jazz music, or pick up a surfboard for the first time for a paddle next to the event.
“The focal point of this event is all about human connection more than anything.” Now living in Australia, McNeill organises the event with his Sumner-based sister Mahalia, which wouldn’t go ahead without the community’s support, he said.
Day two of surfing takes place today, followed up by the sold-out street party, set to welcome nearly 1500 people. Tomorrow will feature a team surfing competition, more live music and the prizegiving event.
The full Single Fin Mingle schedule can be found online.
No guns, no shooting and no jumping is hard to come by in a video game, but a Christchurch team has nailed its debut title without requiring a body count.
Black Salt Games’ release of Dredge has the team of four pinching themselves to check it really is reality they’re experiencing as the video game clocks up nearly 1.5 million copies globally and numerous awards.
“We don’t know what universe this is,” Dredge producer and Black Salt Games chief executive Nadia Thorne said.
“It’s crazy, absolutely crazy.” Dredge is a single-player fishing game set at sea with sinister undercurrents, prompting players to outsmart rather than defeat enemies while exploring, finding objects and doing services for characters.
The actions were “quite different from everyday video games”, Dredge programmer/writer Joel Mason said.
Typically when people thought about video games, characters were shooting people, running around and jumping, “whereas [with] our game, there are no guns”.
Fishing was a “surprisingly common element” in video games as a small activity characters could do to pass time, he said, but in Dredge, it’s the “core focus”.
The game was created by Thorne, Mason, lead artist Alex Ritchie, and 3-D artist Michael Bastiaens. Only half the team had fished in the real world, and Ritchie was vegetarian, Thorne said.
But as soon as the idea came up at the start of 2021, “we all saw something in it”, Mason added.
When it was released in 2023, it exceeded their expectations.
“Being our debut title, we would’ve been in a really good position if we sold something like 50,000, and that would’ve been quite crazy for a first time studio.”
Dredge surpassed that figure on the day of its launch, and over 1 million copies were sold worldwide within six months, she said.
More than a year since its release, it was “rounding in on 1.5 million copies”.
“Just the amount of sales has been insane, let alone the awards, which none of us ever expected.”
The indie video game took home three awards at the New Zealand Games Awards 2023, including the grand prize. It also won the inaugural South by South West Sydney Game of the Year 2023, while the results are yet to be revealed from a few finalist positions at the Nebula Awards, Hugo Award and the Bafta Games Awards held in England.
Thorne said heading to the Baftas this weekend felt surreal as the game was up against some of the “biggest titles”, which had cost “hundreds of millions of dollars and taken thousands of people to create”.
“We’re a team of four in little old New Zealand.”
The creators all “fell into” gaming, and met at Cerebral Fix before branching out on their own during the Covid pandemic, she said.
“None of us set out to be game developers.”
Dredge’s unexpected success made the team want to do something charitable, so they donated to the NZ Whale and Dolphin Trust because “it’s the same environment our game is set in”, Thorne said
“We have ... whales and dolphins in our game. We’ve had success based on the ocean, it seemed right to give back to the ocean.”
But the team had to be wise about putting the intelligent marine life into the game.
“Most gamers get up to mischief,” Bastiaens said, and he didn’t want players to hurt the mammals, even if it wasn’t real life.
If boats get too close to a whale, the mammals can swim under it, and there’s no weapons that can be used against them.
“You can never harm them.”