The sanitisation of Skate reminds me how far counterculture has fallen and how hard it can be to stay inspired

I remember having a chat with my old barber last year about the Skate trailer. We weren’t concerned with the popular gripes. We were just stoked to record new edits and re-enter the classic Skate flowstate on a new engine that would hopefully have more grounded physics. My barber happened to be the frontman of Syracuse straight-edge hardcore band All 4 All. This was a punk rock barbershop, and fittingly, we both shared a fixation on landing tricks in Skate 3 as sketchy as possible.

To land sketchy is to land imperfectly, to look as if not in control. The leather jacket-wearing, kitchen-tattooing pro skaters in Baker, Zero, and Emerica videos were famous for making sketchy look really cool in the early 00s. I no longer live in Syracuse, but I imagine my old barber (shout out Sam, hope you’re well) is just as disappointed as I that the new Skate doesn’t even allow players to land sketchy.

Sure, if I don’t rotate all the way or catch my flip for a good half-second before landing, the game’s UI will tell me my trick was “SKETCHY” and dock my points, but the animations have become virtually indistinguishable from landing “CLEAN” – smooth, near-perfect, fully in-control. An automatic revert will make up for all the missing degrees in my attempted 180’s and 360’s. My feet always land perfectly on the bolts of my board. My knees always brace gently at just the right angle upon impact. My pendulum wrists always move in concert. There’s nothing wrong with a clean, perfect contest-like approach to skating but it can feel robotic to some.

Previous Skate games would animate sketchy landings with heel and toe drags, drop knees, twisting torsos and flailing arms. For players who appreciated a clean execution, landing sketchy might be something to avoid but those animations added a nice contrast. A way for players to turn their mistakes into happy accidents, dripping with lifelike style.

(To be fair, there is one example of a sketchy landing in Skate so far. If you make it down a high enough drop without bailing, your character might shift their weight to the back and drag their hand behind them for extra support. The latter part is sometimes known colloquially as a “Baker maker” – named after the previously mentioned board company – and seems to happen at random.)

Skateboarding is a pastime where style is at the forefront. Style isn’t just what a skater wears, nor is it a cheap measure for aesthetic appeal, but rather the unique way their body moves and reacts to being on the board. In a multiplayer game, it is jarring that all the skaters in this city have this same automated smoothness. It’s like if an MMORPG forced everyone to play the same class. Sure, we can differentiate ourselves with trick selection and the very limited clothing options, but after a few hours, it starts to feel like we’re all just making our puppets do the same dance to the same song.

Automated parallel style is just one symptom of Skate’s issue with sameness. Everything has a real optimised-for-profit feel. Even including the cash-locked items, all the clothes feel like they were found in the clearance bin of a department store’s youth section. The four districts of San Vansterdam feel largely indistinguishable in terrain and aesthetic, as opposed to the previous fictional cities of San Vanelona and Port Carvington, which had distinct sections that each invited a particular type of skateboarding.

This sameness is all disturbingly highlighted by the game’s lore and narrative touches, which feel quite loaded despite the game not having a dedicated story mode. Injuries do not exist in this world because of a tech start-up called ImpervaTEK that have graciously shared their forbidden science with the locals. This isn’t explained any further, but the implications are terrifying and probably include microchips. The advanced tutorial is guided by three city councilors who also happen to be skaters (and are voiced by real-life pro skaters), all singing the praises of ImpervaTEK, augmented reality, and your smartphone AI assistant, Vee. It all feels like a sterile, dystopian nightmare, or what would happen if Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk got to develop their own sandbox city.

Obviously, this isn’t the vibe anyone expected from a skateboarding game, but at the risk of overintellectualising the story of the Skate series, it feels inevitable that we landed here. The world of Skate was already heading in a sterile, sanitised, corporate direction – guided by the trends in real-life skateboarding.

The single-player campaign of Skate (2007) kicked off with you filming a line with legendary NYC skate photographer and filmmaker, Giovanni Reda, whom you serendipitously just met trying to get clips at some schoolyard in the fictional city of San Vanelona. As you gracefully roll off a curb, right after front-boarding a handrail, you get hit by a bus.

What follows is a classic skate video staple, the silly montage skit. All the pros in the game act as medical staff as your character gets rushed into surgery, and your head surgeon is Mark Gonzalez, the real-world pioneer of street and handrail skating, sick! Afterwards, you create your character, and Reda decides to take you under his wing and introduce you to all the hot pros. Along your journey, you get hooked up with all your favorite brands and become a pro yourself in the process. Congratulations!

Skate 2’s (2009) montage starts with your character being released from prison, because you were arrested for some skateboarding-related crime or something. Fuckin’ cops, man. Reda picks you up from prison, and after a sweet embrace, you get into his car and begin your hero’s return. He clothes you, feeds you, and finds you refuge at a skate shop and skate park owned by local old head Slappy (who also returns as one of San Vansterdam’s city councilors in the current release).

San Vanelona has become a totalitarian hellscape in your absence. The city council has teamed up with a corporate security firm to skate-stop most of the architecture and physically assault anyone skating downtown. You cement yourself as the hero by kickstarting various community events, contests, and other shenanigans with pros and locals. Turning San Vanelona into a place where skating can thrive, where the city council has no choice but to terminate their relationship with a private security firm brutalising its free-spirited citizens, because that is the will of the people. And of course, none of this could be possible without the most prominent pro in the story, skater-turned-media-magnate Rob Dyrdek. With your street influence and his finances, you create a fully skateable downtown plaza for San Vanelona’s citizens.

So, where did we go from there, after accomplishing our dreams in the first game and creatively liberating a city in the second? We, uh, went on vacation and became entrepreneurs.

Skate 3 (2010) moved the action to Port Carvington, a paradise where fun obstacles fall from the sky and even the security guards skate. Honestly, I could have had fun with this idea of our hero getting a well-deserved rest if it weren’t for the goal of the single-player campaign: to sell one million skateboards to the masses.

There was some element of a comeback story alluded to in the opening scene: you were about to make history with the trick of your life, a street megaramp air over a giant statue of a shark, camera crews everywhere, a stunt on the same level as Tony Hawk landing the first 900. You bailed horrendously to the disappointment of everyone. Reda, your guardian angel, once again got you back on your feet and told you to stop putting your body on the line for your sponsors and to just start a company with him.

You stack clips and enter contests while he handles all the marketing, so the two of you can sell a million boards. Reda also delegated his filming duties to your friend Shingo from the first game, who is now a film student at a local college (and who also comes back as one of the previously mentioned city councilors of San Vansterdam in the new Skate). But you never got to see anything of consequence from your actions other than product sales going up, which felt rather empty and capitalist for capitalism’s sake.

Now, I’m not criticizing Skate 2 or 3 for highlighting skateboarders in positions of wealth or ownership. Skater-owned companies like Baker Boys Distribution have been largely responsible for skateboarding’s thriving cultural moments. We are lucky that storied legends, like Andrew Reynolds, Jim Greco – the coolest person who has ever lived, let alone ridden a skateboard – and Erik Ellington, have not only continued to skate on camera the past 30 years but have curated young talent, produced videos that document this pastime, and continue to define aesthetics with apparel and board graphics.

Yet, the framing of Skate 3’s entrepreneurial campaign wasn’t concerned with nourishing the next generation or preserving culture. It was just about selling boards and making your brand bigger. Quite literally, the game told you that your character had already become a “skate legend”. It was time to become an “industry mogul”.

Skate 3 was a fitting end to the OG trilogy, signaling the arrival of skateboarding as pop culture and its departure from counterculture. Sure, pros like Tony Hawk, Ryan Sheckler, and Bam Margera were already established media icons, but that might have had more to do with video games and reality TV than actual skateboarding. At that point, Bam was more known for Jackass and Viva La Bam, Sheckler was a teen heartthrob, and while the Birdman was a household name, I reckon more people knew him for the video games and internet presence than his footage.

Rob Dyrdek, another pro skater reaching a broader audience as a media personality, had rolled out a whole new type of skateboarding contest during Skate 3’s launch cycle. Street League was a redefined street skating tournament founded in an attempt to blur the gap between real street skating and contests. It was even added to Skate 3 as DLC (I need to stop here to mention that there’s an unseen crew in the new game that is constantly referred to as the DLC, which feels metatextually ominous). Street League brought skateboarding to an even wider audience and added predictive statistics and scoring. This would carve a path in competitive skateboarding that rewarded consistency over risk-taking and creativity. A path that would be seen as the default to thousands of impressionable youths.

Skate 3 had come out in this golden twilight for the culture. Generation-defining skate films, such as Stay Gold and Mindfield, had just been released, but there was the looming threat of a commercial implosion. The previously mentioned videos were the respective projects of skater-owned footwear company Emerica and Dyrdek’s own Alien Workshop. Both companies would struggle to survive in the next few years, because skateboarding gear was also becoming more corporate.

Nike (and its subsidiary Converse), Adidas, New Balance, and Vans were establishing global superteams, ensuring big brand presence in every facet of skateboarding. From the big, televised contests to the coolest, underground street productions, skateboarding was starting to become visibly aligned more with logos than a DIY spirit. By 2014, those riding skater-owned footwear brands had become a loud minority. The board brands that were doing well were dependent on having key pros that were also sponsored by big footwear. Eventually, even the board company-produced skate videos would sneak a subtle zoom in on the shoes, making to highlight three stripes, a swoosh, or a star.

Of the 79 brands that existed in Skate 3 to customise a character’s appearance and board, only 49 remain. With so many brands going defunct, getting sold and re-sold to the point of identity death, or getting absorbed by larger companies, style has become less diverse than ever.

Deathwish used to be a board brand defined by chaotic anti-authoritarian hijinks and playful satanic motifs. Even people who didn’t know anything about skateboarding could figure out they were doing something different. But now, even veteran skaters might have a hard time distinguishing a new Deathwish video from that of a company like Supreme.

Today, most skate videos seem to blur this line, this formulaic median between clean and sketchy. So many tricks on film feel just imperfect enough to feel vaguely stylish. Also, everyone wears baggy pants now. And to bring it back to Syracuse, everyone and their mother has been trying to film like Bill Stroebeck for the past decade. I haven’t even said anything about the Olympics yet, like we have skaters out there in Nike and Adidas-branded federation uniforms for christsake!

(Thankfully, there have still been some independent makers of hard and soft goods that keep skateboarding interesting. Pontus Alv spearheaded both Polar Skateboards and Last Resort AB. Veteran graphic artist, Mark Foster, has kept Heroin Skateboards sell-out free since 1998. Both skaters being forever champions of the weird, off-the-beaten path kids.)

Yes, Skate being a live service game with a bloated battle pass and cash shop, is endemic of the worst corporate trends in video games, but skateboarding itself also shoulders some of this blame. Look no further than two of the four board brands we can currently choose from. As I write this, Girl Skateboards is selling real-life decks in giant blind boxes for a Sanrio collab. Santa Cruz had a similar product line for a Pokémon collab years ago. Loot boxes, folks! Loot boxes in real-world skateboarding!

Skateboarding games will always be exaggerations or caricatures of the pastime they’re based on. While early Skate games attempted to be gritty and grounded compared to the Tony Hawk series, they were cartoonish in their rags-to-riches-to-incarceration-to-activist narrative. When skateboarding is largely sterile, their representation in games becomes cartoonishly sterile.

The political and tech vibes of the new game aren’t that far-fetched, either. Former Alien Workshop (also a board company referenced in one of Vee’s passing dialogue lines) and DC shoes pro, Mikey Taylor, has become a private equity real estate investor and was elected as a councilman for the City of Thousand Oaks, CA, USA, where he has been fighting on behalf of *checks notes* land developers.

Former Girl Skateboards and current Nike SB pro, Eric Koston (who was featured in the original Skate trilogy as the biggest name at the time), now rides for the skateboard division of EDGLRD, a tech studio founded by Harmony Korine with an emphasis on generative AI VFX.

When I look at the kookery that its namesake industry has allowed, I can’t be shocked at what the new world of Skate looks like. I know this subculture is getting passed around by out-of-touch suits. I just don’t like being reminded.

Skate was a series about wish fulfillment, playing as a master of a craft uniquely situated between art and athletics. That’s why this series was able to hold its own against the Tony Hawk games. That’s why Skate 3 was never usurped by the hyperrealism of simulators like Skater XL and Session. It wasn’t about busting out the most insane tricks to get the highest score and it wasn’t about fighting against the most realistic physics. It was about freedom of fantasy.

The fantasy of being whatever type of skater you wanted to be, choosing where in this subculture to belong. And again, this isn’t so easily reduced to just the clothes or the real-world brands, or even which IRL pro skaters you get to pretend to be in community with. It was in the flex of the skateboarding itself.

Maybe you liked to be technical, cleanly flipping in and out of downtown ledges, or maybe you like to barely roll away from huge crusty rails, arms flailing and knees twisting everything. Maybe your arms drifted just a bit getting back into a bowl after a backside air. Maybe you awkwardly bowed after no complying a small set of stairs.

Sure, these are all tricks you can still do – except no complys, which automatically 180 now, for some reason – and yeah, they do feel better than ever to perform. But every trick feels the same, as do all the places I can do them.

I’ve watched the devlogs. I saw the lead gameplay developer and programmer drop in on a little ramp! One of them was wearing a Converge shirt while doing it, sick! Say what you will, but the team at Full Circle seemed genuinely invested in helping players achieve that fantasy.

The way they talked about introducing more tricks like wallies, slappies, and impossibles. Tricks that had a very trendy moment a bit after Skate 3 – never considered particularly difficult and even thought of as dorky or played out at times, but very tasteful in the right time and place. Full Circle has skaters who understand that it’s not about doing the best or the hardest tricks, just what looks and feels good to the individual. What best fits the player trying to meaningfully interact with the playful concrete obstacle in front of them. It’s just hard to make meaning when my avatar feels more limited than ever.

Given that Skate’s publisher and Full Circle’s parent company will soon be owned by a conservative-leaning consortium with a need to cut costs, I would not be surprised if this is as good as it gets, and I never get to see the fully-realized vision of these cool t-shirt-having developers.

But it’s nice, still, to get lost in Skate sometimes. I get to have a very obnoxious anime grip tape on my board, and jumping into impromptu sessions with online randos can be fun and even encouraging. Trying to get clips in Skate is a lot like trying to create anything these days. I get annoyed at AI, complain about the city I’m in, and spend much time worrying that my style is too much like everyone else’s.