Surfing Just Like Bethany Down In Texas
By Chad Pata
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More than a quarter century after Paul Goo’s surf simulator debuted in Waikiki as a marketing ploy, it finally hit the big time last Sunday as the centerpiece to a dream room on ABC’s hit show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.
For those unfamiliar with the show, it features one very deserving family each week having their hovel bulldozed and transformed into a dream home specially suited for their needs.
In this case it was the Carr family, the six of whom lived in a broken-down home in the East Texas town of Mineola. Katrina and Mike adopted four children after they were abandoned in Kazakhstan. Two of the girls were born with amniotic band syndrome, causing Ryanne, 10, to have both legs and an arm amputated and Rina, 4, to lose her right leg.
But how does this connect to Goo and his invention 4,000 miles away?
The girls’ hero and inspiration: surfer Bethany Hamilton.
Despite their landlocked location, the girls love surfing and find motivation in Hamilton’s story. A chance to surf would seem unlikely for them, except for Goo’s invention.
So the show contacted Goo, explained their idea about a surf room for the girls and asked if he would donate one of his simulators.
“At first I didn’t even think about the national exposure,” says Goo. “I just thought it would be good for the kids.”
The simulator involves a real surfboard mounted a few inches off the ground that you control through shifting your weight just like on a real board. Meanwhile, the action is projected through a TV so that you can navigate your way through a virtual wave while avoiding various obstacles.
They specially designed a board with the kids’ names on it, reprogrammed it so that no matter how many times the girls wiped out they would keep going, and finally removed an obstacle in the game that struck too close to home.
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“They didn’t want any sharks in the game and we were like, that’s right,” says Goo, knowing the Hamilton story (in 2003, while surfing, she lost her left arm to a shark on Kauai). “We have to take the sharks out because the girls do not want to see that!”
The final hurdle was out of Goo’s hands: Because of his trepidation toward flying, he would not be on set for the filming, and he had no idea if the girls would know what to do with the simulator, having never seen one before.
He asked if the host, Ty Pennington, could explain it to them, but the producers explained that the spontaneity of the family’s surprise is what really resonates with their viewers.
The girls were going to have to figure it out on their own.
As it turned out, the fears were unfounded.
“They went straight in and jumped on it,” says Goo, “and they must have been watching so many surf videos because they got on and were doing the poses. The kids were amazing.”
Goo even went as far as to have the girls’ faces put onto the bodies surfing on the screen so that they could see themselves on the waves. It’s amazing how far technology has come since he first debuted it in 1984.
The idea was the brainchild of Goo and T&C owner Craig Suihara. Tired of giving away T-shirts to promote their brand, they dreamed of holding an indoor surfing competition.
Goo, who had grown up tearing apart and rebuilding everything in his house, got the idea of constructing an Atari joystick, putting a surf-board on top of it and controlling the “action” on a projection screen.
By action, for those who are old enough to remember the Commodore 64, he had a stick figure riding a sine wave. But it was an instant hit. Soon they had hundreds of kids and adults alike coming down to try indoor surfing.
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Local television stations and eventually USA Today did pieces on it, creating such a stir that Nintendo came a-courting, looking to have Goo design a game for them.
They created the T&C surf cartridge, but it never had much of a chance to succeed because of creative differences. Goo envisioned a little surfboard that kids could stand on and ride, whereas Nintendo wanted something that could be packaged neatly in a box.
The result was a manhole cover-looking device that was poorly constructed and poorly received.
“They didn’t understand what the kids wanted,” says Goo. “Everybody wants to stand on top of a surfboard.”
Despite this setback, Goo never let go of the idea, continuing its evolution as technology improved.
He toyed with using optical sensors on the sides of the board so that the rider has to “paddle” into the waves, but people were not too keen on putting their faces where hundreds of feet had been previously. As he tried different twists on the simulator he began to understand what Nintendo eventually realized with its creation of the Wii: Keep it simple.
“People need to control things in their lives now; we are all out of control,” says Goo. “People want simple things and they want to be successful, they don’t want to be confused.”
It took him decades, but his doggedness and simplification of the product began to open markets to him. His simulators now can be found everywhere from a Marriott in Florida to Mumbai, India. He has 20 simulators that he rents out to conventions all over the country now, so that dentists in Des Moines can get barreled after being bored to death with the latest breakthroughs in veneer technology.
Before Extreme Makeover his simulator was featured on the DIY channel show Man Caves.
These days Goo is taking a more environmental lean, programming games where kids surf and pick up trash, all while atop recycled surfboards made of shredded documents and Elmer’s glue.
Beyond the positive message, he really wants to bring real waves into his simulator so that one can be riding famous waves the world over, not just computer renderings of them. But this is easier said than done.
“With the computer-generated wave, it’s like moving 10,000 flies,” says Goo. “But with footage of a real wave it’s like moving 20 billion flies all at once because a wave has so much information in it. That’s the hard part.”
Yeah, it’ll be a challenge, but that hasn’t stopped him yet, and there are a couple of little girls in Texas who are very grateful that he never gave up his dream so that they could live theirs.
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