Skate fans will finally get the game they’ve spent over a decade begging for. The series’ latest installment, a live-service reboot simply called Skate, will launch into early access on Sept. 16. It’s a significant moment for a community that memed the game into existence by spamming “Skate 4” in livestream chats for years until publisher EA finally took notice. But when you have a community that passionate and that vocal, how does it take 15 years to get a new game in a popular game series?
In a video interview with Polygon, senior creative director Deran Chung explained why it took this long to get Skate off the ground. As he explained, it was a matter of the developers at EA Black Box hitting a creative dead end following a few whirlwind years creating the first three games in rapid succession.
“I won’t lie. At the end of Skate 3, I was pretty fried,” Chung told Polygon.
“I was like — well, most of the team was like, we can’t do any more of these,” Chung said. “The turnaround from Skate 2 to Skate 3 was less than a year, if I remember correctly. And we came out and I don’t think people who were playing 2 even knew 3 was out or were ready. No one was opining for the next one! And so then we stopped and a bunch of people went different ways. I worked on Garden Warfare, et cetera, but having a new challenge was exciting and fresh to us, but it was only a couple years before I was like, Oh man, at some point we’re going to do something. And it was just kind of waiting for the right moment.”
“It was this crazy sleeper cell thing of game developers who are waiting to be activated to work on the new game.”
Though the team would split up after Skate 3 (and EA Black Box shut down altogether in 2013), the Vancouver-based developers stayed in touch in the years following. Even when the idea of returning to the series wasn’t on the table, there was still an unspoken agreement that some teammates would drop everything to return to Skate.
“So many of us were from or in Vancouver and whether they stayed at the company or not, Vancouver is a pretty small city or the game developer pool is pretty small,” Chung said. “So we would see each other. We have an annual holiday called Skate Paddy’s Day where all the alumni, even back from 2005, we still every St. Patrick’s Day figure out a way of getting together, whoever can make it. And anyone who ever worked on a Skate game is part of the family. And so we would cross paths with each other and be like, ‘Hey, just so you know, I’m down. Just let me know.’ It was this crazy sleeper cell thing of game developers who are waiting to be activated to work on the new game.”
Those weren’t the only people who were hungry for Skate. Fans continued to play the old games, to the point that it created headaches for EA engineers who had to continue fixing up the old games long after the series was put on ice.
“Some of our older online software engineers from Skate were also working on Garden Warfare with me,” Chung said. “And they’re like, ‘Why won’t that game die? I keep having to repair the servers! Why are there so many people playing them!?’”
Even with an army of game developers raring to go at a moment’s notice and fans still playing in droves, Chung still felt that the moment had to be right. The team couldn’t just bring back Skate for the sake of reheating a leftover IP. Something had to be a convincing catalyst — and that’s exactly what fans eventually provided once they started begging for Skate 4 en masse. The team behind Skate now lovingly calls it a game that was “memed into existence,” but what’s important for Chung is that it came from a genuine moment rather than a manufactured one.
“The way that the groundswell for the next gate kind of evolved felt natural. It felt right,” Chung said. “And to me it was about identifying that moment. This is it. This is the time to do it. And so whether it took four years, five years, seven years, whatever it was, it may have never happened or we could have missed the moment, and it could have passed. And so I was just able to identify this beat.”
Fans will now get to see if all the memeing was worth it when Skate launches into early access on Sept. 16 for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
