Extreme BASE Jump 3D!

Technically, I suppose, a cliff is bigger than a wall. Higher and wilder, in any case. But for some reason, when a landform gets especially epic, people don’t call it a cliff. They call it a wall. Or, more precisely, they call it a “walls”. Kanangra Walls is such a landform, monumental in scale. It’s a cliff, roughly 500 metres high. It’s up past the Blue Mountains, in New South Wales, Australia.

The Blue Mountains themselves have a bunch of reasonably epic cliffs and escarpments, but the ridge tops are crowded with suburban development and busloads of Korean tourists. It’s a safe kind of natural majesty. Keep heading west though, and things get wilder. Seriously wild. Primordial, even. They call it the Blue Labyrinth, a network of ridges and valleys in which you can become hopelessly lost less than four hours from a pub. You’ll die of thirst before you’ve even gotten a grip on what’s happened to you.

Kanangra Walls is in the middle of all that. I’ve been out here a few times, and I remember once, I must have been no more than 16, I was staggering back up the sandstone staircase from down in the valley, and I met a pair of Canadian tourists.

“Is there a tea house at the end of this walk?” they asked, all maple-scented innocence. My laughter echoed off the ancient canyons and isolated stands of Wollemi Pines, and it was cruel. Cruel like this landscape. Then I explained there was nothing at the end of this walk but a sign forbidding them from lighting any fires, and a thousand kilometres of trackless wilderness. The Canadians turned white and then turned back.

Anyway, today I’m out here because a new videogame development start-up called Terminal Velocity has decided to BASE jump off the Kanangra Walls.

“Because it’s a BASE jumping game,” says lead developer Kevin Terminal.

“An extreme BASE jumping game,” adds project manager and stunt-double Ace Velocity.

“And it’s in 3D,” says Terminal. “We’re here today to do some motion capture. Ace will be the model, and he’ll make a BASE jump off Kanangra Walls and we’ll motion capture it. With all that stuff in the back of the Landcruiser there.”

Terminal indicates a very shiny and obviously very new Toyota Landcruiser parked quite close to the edge of the drop-off. It’s painted that colour they call “champagne.”

“Wow,” says my crazy ex-third flatmate, who for reasons which are difficult to explain and even harder to excuse, has followed me out here. “That is one sweet-looking four-wheel-drive. Can I have a go in the driver’s seat?”

Terminal looks at my crazy ex-third flatmate with the air of a man who doesn’t quite understand what he’s seeing, or accept that he has to deal with seeing it.

“Uh, yeah sure, whatever.”

Meanwhile I’ve been mulling the whole concept of this exercise around in my head, where it’s competing with a measure-and-a-half of Frangelico that I had in the pub before we all piled into Terminal Velocity’s sweet Landcruiser, behind the wheel of which my crazy ex-third flatmate now awkwardly inserts himself and commences to making with the “vroom vroom” noises.

“Hang on,” I say. “Wait a second here. You guys are motion-capturing a BASE jump?”

Kevin Terminal indicates the huge pile of expensive and complicated motion-capture technology protruding from the Landcruiser’s tailgate. Various wires and sensors and whatnot trail across the hard-packed earth of the cliffside parking lot and connect to the weird bodysuit Ace Velocity is wearing. Velocity looks like nothing less than a ninja covered in ping-pong balls. Something about normal-mapping, he had told me earlier that morning, back in the pub while I sipped on my Frangelico and listened to the clock strike nine.

“Yes,” says Kevin Terminal. “Motion capturing a BASE jump. First time it’s ever been done. We had to get a lot of extra wire for the cables.”

“You’re motion-capturing a guy free-falling through the air?”

“Indeed,” says Kevin Terminal.

“Isn’t that completely pointless?” I ask, with some merit, I think.

Something seems to snap, deep inside Ace Velocity, and it isn’t one of the cables. “Shut up bitch, it is NOT pointless!” he screams right in my face. “The whole point is that our audience is HARD CORE, right? They know their stuff, and they want to know the flailing limbs of the player model are acting as they would if they were making a REAL BASE jump! They don’t want to see some pimp dope ass fake jump in a studio in front of a green screen. You get me?”

I wipe some of the spit off my face. “Except for the pimp part, yes.”

“This Landcruiser is awesome!” says my crazy ex-third flatmate. “Sweet dashboard!”

I feel honour bound to point out to the Terminal Velocity team that my crazy ex-third flatmate is most definitely not safe behind the wheel of their $90,000 car.

“Bitch,” snaps Ace Velocity, “it’s a truck. And anyway, I’ve got the keys.”

The Landcruiser’s engine comes to life with that characteristic diesel rattle. This doesn’t improve Ace Velocity’s rapidly disintegrating mood.

“Okay, so maybe I didn’t have the keys. Give me the keys, bitch!” he screams at my crazy ex-third flatmate.

My crazy ex-third flatmate, for his part, cackles, kills the engine, and tosses the keys to Ace Velocity who, rather alarmingly for an extreme sportsman who depends on quick reflexes and perfect performance every time to save his freaking life, fumbles them.

“Yes, ANYWAY, we’re motion capturing the jump today,” says Kevin Terminal, “which will be just one of the many things we’ll be doing to ensure this BASE jumping game is the most realistic and intense BASE jumping game ever.”

“Cool,” I say, because it looks like the interview is about to generate some actual facts, “what are some of the other things?”

“What?” asks Terminal.

“Some of the other things that will make this the most realistic and intense BASE jumping game ever,” I say, with an all-too-familiar sinking feeling.

Ace Velocity rounds on me, tripping only slightly on all the cables he has attached to him. “Listen!” he screams right in my face. “Just shut the hell up and savour the rush, okay?”

“Why are you so angry?” I ask.

“He knows he’s going to die young,” says Terminal, a little apologetically.

“Bitch, that ain’t what makes me angry!” Velocity howls. “That’s what makes me live life one handful at a time! Stuffed into my ASS, bitch!” He does a horrific little mime. “You know it! What makes me angry is that my bitch mother wants the truck back by five thirty so she can pick up my bitch sister from her bitch pimp ballet lesson!”

I take this opportunity to ask Ace Velocity if there’s anyone in his life who isn’t a bitch.

“Tupac,” he says. I reflect that I might have guessed.

“Well,” says Kevin Terminal, leaning on the word as only the acutely embarrassed can. “I guess we should get this show on the road. Or off the cliff. Whatever. Ace, are you ready?”

“I was born ready,” says Ace Velocity, somewhat predictably. “Because BASE stands for Bridge, Antenna, Span and Earth and that last one is the bitch who kills you when she gets in your face and then your face spreads all over her in a sort of jam about this thick.”

I turn away from the ping-pong ninja standing connected to a Landcruiser by a dozen wires, holding his thumb and forefinger a centimetre apart, and look instead at Kevin Terminal. Expectantly. Because Ace Velocity is an extremely exhausting person to interview.

Instead of addressing or even acknowledging his partner’s obvious insanity, Kevin Terminal makes a very big deal of activating all the motion capture technology, and Velocity makes a very big deal of preparing himself psychologically for the jump, which seems to involve looking out over the cliff edge, flexing his hands, and puffing like a woman in second-stage labour.

At some point, at the most crucial point in fact, Ace Velocity - on quiet consultation with Kevin Terminal - hands my crazy ex-third flatmate the keys to the Landcruiser so he can roll it forward about ten metres.

“Uh,” I say again, stepping forward with finger upraised, but of course by then it’s too late.

“Hey check this out!” squeals my crazy ex-third flatmate. “You can totally car-surf this Landcruiser because it’s an automatic. I just shove it in Drive here and, whoops!”

Afterwards, during a series of interviews with the SES and the police, I was called upon to explain to them - experts all in automotive mishaps - how my crazy ex-third flatmate could possibly manage to both kick the Landcruiser into Reverse and also get the accelerator
jammed down, as he falls out of it.

To be honest at the time I’m not really watching the truck as it hurls itself backwards off Kanangra Walls at about twenty kilometres an hour. Though I do hear the big diesel engine howl as the wheels find themselves with nothing to push against but rarefied mountain air.

No, at the time I’m more focused on the way Kevin Terminal and Ace Velocity, with mere split-seconds to react, begin very calmly and methodically severing the cables that connect Velocity to the Landcruiser, even as the truck itself hurtles toward the valley floor as only three tonnes of Japanese precision off-road equipment can. The team gets the last cable free roughly no time at all before we hear the faint but unmistakable sound of a nearly-new Landcruiser impacting a jumble of ancient sandstone boulders at a speed of I dunno because, you know, maths.

There is, as they say, one of those pauses.

“Ace!” screams Kevin Terminal. “No no NO!” He leaps forward and crash-tackles his soon-to-be-ex-business partner. “You can’t jump after it man! You can’t jump after it!”
“It could be okay!” screams Ace Velocity. “These Landcruisers are built to mil spec bitch, it might not be a write-off!”

The explosion, five hundred metres below us, seems neither large nor particularly loud, but the gust of hot air it sends up the cliff face is enough to frazzle our eyebrows. Except for Velocity, whose eyes are bugging out so far they provide his eyebrows with a sort of natural protection.

“Um,” I say to my crazy ex-third flatmate, who clearly thinks this is all an enormous gas. “May I suggest you start piss-bolting into the bush right about now?”

“Why?” he asks.

“Because, bitch,” growls Ace Velocity, “if I catch you my mum is going to mess you up.”

“Oh right,” says my crazy ex-third flatmate, and departs for the scrub, hooting.

Kevin Terminal and I exchange slow blinks. “Um,” he says, “just looking at your yellow boots there. Are you any good at hitchhiking? Because it’s a hell of a long walk back to Lithgow.”