The late ‘90s and early 2000s were the era of extreme sports. The X Games were established as part of mainstream culture. Tony Hawk landed the elusive 900. And of course, extreme sports video games shot to the top of the charts both commercially and critically. Seven years into the new millennium, a new king of virtual skateboarding had been established. The pick-up-and-play style of the Tony Hawk series had run its course and been replaced with EA Black Box’s Skate series, a more grounded approach to landing kickflip and grinding rails.
The studio would refine the core of that original game across two more entries culminating in one of the greatest video game sequels ever. 2010’s Skate 3 may not look all that different from what came before it. But the timelessness of the series' core tenants has made it a bonafide classic players are still obsessed with today. Perhaps the biggest part of Skate 3’s legacy after all these years later isn’t how fantastic this entry is, but the mind-boggling fact that this series highpoint hasn’t had a sequel in over 15 years.
Skate 3 is the quintessential sequel from the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 generation. Instead of sweeping innovations, the game strengthens everything its two predecessors did well. The analog stick “flick it” controls that made the first game such a breath of fresh air has been expanded, adding new flips and grabs to your arsenal. The open world of Port Carverton is just as varied as previous games but has a notable and much-needed splash of color. And thankfully, the comedic, laid-back tone of its free-form career mode remains, with the addition of actor (and skater) Jason Lee as Coach Frank to punctuate its humor.
The real heart of Skate 3 is its breezy vibes. There’s not a whole lot to the game aside from what it does extremely well. You’re ultimately trying to become popular enough to sell a million skateboards, but there’s little pressure to complete that goal right away. The story progression is entirely open-ended, letting players find competitions and contests that appeal to them at their own pace.
While that’s become all the rage for contemporary open-world games, the approach works thematically for Skate 3. Going hours without committing to a premade objective fits the freestyle, expressive nature of the sport it’s replicating. There are few games more perfectly suited to queuing up your favorite playlist or album and meditatively hitting spots hoping for a high score or perfecting a looking skate line. It was a cozy masterpiece before it was cool. I’ve regularly hopped into the game over the last 15 years. And I’m not alone.
Whether you’re on TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube, you’ve seen people who are still obsessed with Skate 3. Players are still posting cool tricks, taking advantage of the game’s wonky physics to pull of impossible stunts, or posting painfully hilarious spills, and they’re racking up hundreds of thousands of views. Skate 3, a game two generations told, is somehow a bigger social media phenomenon in 2025 than it was in 2010. It’s one of the most prominent beneficiaries of Xbox’s commitment to backward compatibility. In 2020, the game shot to the top three of sales charts after going on sale, a rare example of a non-multiplayer-focused game maintaining its popularity. The game has since been added to Game Pass, cultivating an active player base in its online modes (which EA is still maintaining).
It’s been five years since Skate., the upcoming fourth game in the series, was announced.
Despite the game’s unprecedented popularity, the series has remained inexplicably dormant. While Black Box would shut down for good in 2013, you’d think Skate 3’s evergreen appeal with mainstream audiences would get its publisher to assign another team to a sequel as quickly as possible. In reality, however, it’s done the total opposite. It took 10 years of fan groundswell before Electronic Arts finally announced a Skate sequel in 2020. But aside from a handful of minor updates from the new studio Full Circle, there’s been nothing to report on the free-to-play follow-up since. As of now, the game is scheduled to release sometime in the next year.
As disappointing as it’s been, the active fandom around the series has been totally fine waiting for its sequel. And a big part of that is because of just how darn good Skate 3 is a decade and a half later. While the novelty of a new Skate game with zero financial barriers to entry is likely to reach the same success as the older games in the series (provided its microtransactions are handled properly), everything that game will likely do well was already perfected 15 years ago.
Skate 3 is a phenomenal case of a game being so good that it never left the minds of the millions who played it. And the series’ finely tuned high point is still enticing players all these years later.
