It’s time to announce Skate 4, you cowards

The time is now for the critically acclaimed Skate series to make its return, and hopefully EA will announce it at EA Play during E3 week.

The amount of great sports-related video games out there is staggering, but one aspect that’s generally missing from the space is innovation. Because sports themselves don’t change that much on a year-to-year basis, fresh takes and new ideas are few and far between, especially in the modern era where hardware limitations are no longer the biggest hindrance to an otherwise well-made game.

It’s why a game series like Madden NFL or MLB The Show can often stagnate as fans feel less and less like the value proposition makes sense. Sure, Madden can add a story mode and that’s neat, but the on-field action sees tweaks more than it sees radical overhauls.

One sport that was practically begging for a video game makeover, at least in 2007, was skateboarding. The sport that saw its video game beginnings go from the downhill racing of Skate or Die to the over-the-top hilarity of the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series was in a really great place for a time. I think few would argue against Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 and 3 being among the greatest sports games of all time.

They weren’t realistic by any means, but combined great level design, era-defining soundtracks and gameplay that was fun for basically anybody.

But like other sports games, the Tony Hawk series began to stagnate. There were still good games here and there, specifically the Underground games, but they eventually hit a wall where their biggest audience was kind of over it.

Enter Skate

Published by EA and developed by the now-defunct EA Black Box, Skate brought a fresh new take on skateboarding games: realism, relative to the Tony Hawk series. You could still do things in Skate that you could never do in real life, but there was a very physics-based approach to the way the board moved, and it felt like a much more grounded game as a result. But they still managed to make it fun, creating sort of a middle ground between Tony Hawk and real life.

When the very first public Skate demo was made available for the Xbox 360, I downloaded it. The demo carried a one-hour time limit and only included one area you could skate in, but you could play it multiple times, though you were forced to sit and watch the sizzle reel at the end of it to try and get you to pre-order the game.

I played that demo through at least 40 times. That’s one single skatepark, one hour, no progress saving, nothing but raw gameplay. And I played it more than most people play most actual video games. I also spent quite a bit of time trying to launch out of the demo park, as some found there was another small area you could get to if you took the right angle at one of the map’s boundaries.

Skate’s control style utilized motions with the right stick on the controller for flip tricks and emphasized a deliberate, weighty style of play that felt, above all, rewarding.

Rather than stringing together 100 tricks for a million point combo in Tony Hawk, Skate was more about finding the perfect rail in the big, open world and just ... doing whatever felt and looked cool.

You might notice that the gifs I use for Skate 3 in this article mostly look like they’re from the same place — that’s because that’s how you play the game. You find a spot, and you just attack it over and over until you’re bored with it.

It usually takes me hours before I get bored with a spot.

I spent hours and hours on the same rail, doing bigspin flips into smith grinds, or trying to nail the perfect tre flip over a tough gap. The game’s story mode emphasized this with “Own the Spot” challenges, and heavily featured a video editor to share your best clips, which was well before Twitch and one-click sharing were things in the video gaming space.

People used that in-game video editor to create their own versions of skate videos, and a community developed around it that has certainly slowed down, but is still active to this day. I had an old YouTube account that was just videos from the Skate series, set to music from some of my favorite songs at the time. I miss those videos (I’ve tried to find them multiple times, but they’re either deleted or so buried in search results I will never find them).

Skate was a game that, at first, appeared to be a sanitized, realistic version of Tony Hawk. But it was immediately fun and silly, with a decent story mode featuring several professional skaters and lots of THE GOOFS. Also, wrecking into things was fun. Stupidly fun. There was even an entire set of challenges around just absolutely wrecking your shit as badly as you could.

Pedestrians tended to get in your way a lot. Sometimes they would screw up something big, and sometimes that was fun, too. I didn’t see the man in the gif above until we ran into each other, me going at the speed of a ... speeding car. I laughed for a solid minute before I continued playing (after, you know, saving video of it).

I wasn’t a skater in real life myself, though my large group of skater friends all were in love with the Skate games, and spent hours and hours playing it just as I’ve described above. The game wound up bringing together a community that still creates those videos, still skates the same spots with regularity because Black Box nailed the gameplay and design so perfectly (on all three games), and still desperately wants a sequel.

For the first time in several years, I jumped into an online game of Skate 3 while writing this. I got into a freeskate lobby at a random location, and entered a room with four other people in it, just skating around one of the locations in the world. Two of them had microphones, and were talking about wanting Skate 4 when I got in there.

If such a sequel is ever announced, I’m gonna boot up Skate 3 and run into pedestrians over and over to celebrate! Like this lady, who clotheslined me off this rail.

It’s time for Skate 4!

Even if you’ve never played a skateboarding game, you’ve probably seen somebody on social media use the hashtag #Skate4 or say something about it. The cry for a sequel to 2010’s Skate 3 has been consistent, united and loud. It’s legitimately shocking that the amount of support a sequel has seen hasn’t led to an announcement of the fourth game. All three games in the series reviewed and sold well, by all accounts.

And more than that, we just ... really need a new, good skateboarding game. There are two that seem to use Skate as inspiration currently in development, one called Session and one called Skater XL, but I personally am not a fan of the control scheme of the former and have yet to try the latter (though of course, I will give both a chance when they’re finished).

And the last “big” skateboarding game was 2015’s Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5, an abomination of a video game that made me actually angry playing it, it was so bad. I’m not even going to link video because it’s that bad.

Every year, leading up to E3, the largest gaming expo in the world, people flock to social media to demand Skate 4 and every year, they’re disappointed. The fervor, which grew when the third game became popular with streamers, saw a reprint in 2014 to keep up with the sudden demand.

This year’s E3 conference begins on June 11, but EA will hold its own conference, dubbed EA Play, before the trade show kicks off, on June 7-9. Only EA knows whether or not we’ll get Skate 4 then, but we’re nearing a decade of waiting. Until then, find me online in the Xbox 360 version of Skate 3.