For all the people out there who have been excited by Tony Hawk: Ride, and specifically by the prospect of bringing that awesome-looking black skateboard peripheral into their living rooms, some bad news has come out today. In an interview with GI.biz, John Tsui, president of Robomodo (the peripheral's creator) let it be known that the game will ship with a white board, and not the ubiquitous black one we've seen in every screen shot, tech demo, and press conference. 

Tsui states that the white board is more "consumer friendly" and that the black one is "like the Darth Vader of skateboards". Here's the full quote:

"The other thing is the board we've shown so far is like the Darth Vader of skateboards, it's not the finished peripheral. We're going with a white board which is more consumer friendly. It's much more iPod-like for want of a better term. With the white one people inadvertently step on it, but they don't do that with the black one. That's part of the industrial design of the board, to make sure people know it's a skateboard, but it also looks friendly. We want people to see it as a cool gadget as opposed to “what is that black monolith on the floor"

Personally, I don't think that a black skateboard is necessarily intimidating, at least not as much as a $120 price point. But apparently Robomodo seems to think that the public wants something more akin to an Apple product. I'm guessing that this decision was made after some extensive market research. Does this mean that all the early black versions are collector's items now?