Skate Can’t Be Punk, It Never Was

By Moises Taveras | September 23, 2025 | 1:50pm

Video Games Features Skate

Why did anyone expect Skate to be punk, exactly?

A lot of the criticism I’ve seen levied at the newest incarnation of the series, which just launched into early access via EA on September 16, focuses on this particular point. For many, this new Skate game, which sees players dropped into a fictional skater’s paradise called San Vansterdam, falls short on some barometer that measures punk-ness and, because of that, has been labeled inauthentic. I don’t exactly find fault in the argument either—while Nu Skate feels good to play, it looks and sounds incredibly yuppie—but the resulting discussions have seemed to frame earlier games in the series as de facto punk stalwarts, when I’d argue they aren’t and never really have been.

I really admire the early Skate games too! When I was an impressionable tween looking to the world for a new passion to make me cool, games like the Skate franchise were foundational for me. I tried to adopt the style of the game’s characters, as well as their personas and speech patterns. I felt emboldened to bust out that skateboard I’d gotten a few years earlier, and the further I moved into middle school and beyond, the more that passion grew into a love affair with longboarding. I owe them my affinity for punk shit…even if they themselves were hardly punk.

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I can’t blame folks for conflating Skate for something actually punk; it certainly looked the part! The environs of the first few games had a kind of grimy, dilapidated look that rang true for a generation of skaters (and let’s be honest, wannabes) brought up on makeshift skate parks and MTV videos. The characters were dressed to match this vibe, and they sure spoke like they earnestly lived a life dominated by “steeze.” But even then, it wasn’t hard to see past the artifice of it all.

Look no further than the star-studded opening to the original Skate, a slapstick skit detailing how the player character gets maimed in a skating accident. As their body is transported to the hospital, where they are eventually resuscitated, about a dozen professional skaters—all household names to people deeply entrenched in skate culture in the mid-to-late aughts, like Jason Dill and Danny Way—appear and are credited. This act is, of course, partly due diligence (the dudes deserve their credit, after all), but it’s also a work on the part of the developers at EA Black Box, a bid at authenticity as effective as slapping Tony Hawk’s name and appearance on a game case in the late 90s and early 00s.

By the time Skate landed on store shelves in 2007, skating had moved from the streets to the television. Teams were erected and brand deals were cut. Skating hadn’t just gone mainstream; it had sold out. And if there’s one constant of being punk, a famously anti-capitalist ideology, it’s that you never sell out. Meanwhile, the Skate games were packed to the brim with professional skaters who had done just that. I mean no disrespect to those folks (who all deserve to get their bags), but DC Shoes hype-man and Ridiculousness host Rob Dyrdek does not scream punk, and that was already true by the time the series came to popularity.

And this all gets at something that has annoyed me about the conversations surrounding Skate‘s punk-ness: punk has never been a quality that can be bestowed upon a thing just because of its likeness or proximity to its aesthetics. Punk has always been DIY. To be punk is to live punk. You don’t buy some Doc Martens or Vans, rip holes in your jeans, throw on a beanie, and automatically become punk. It needs to be cultivated, and despite the work required to realize it, it needs to be a lot less buttoned up.

Nu Skate has been positioned as contrary to many of the values of those original games, but if you ask me, it sure feels a lot like the inheritor of its legacy of feel-good skate mechanics and cringe posing. So, forgive me if I take umbrage with complaints that this newest game isn’t living up to a fantasy ideal of what punk should look like in games, especially when that idea is completely ahistoric.

That doesn’t mean Skate isn’t without issues, some of which could be alleviated if it did try to inhabit that punk headspace that drove the first several games. The game’s opening hours are a slow crawl that could stand to let go of the player’s hand a bit more. Let San Vansterdam feel more like a skater’s paradise, and less like a corporate retreat. To that end, the game also needs to take the skater AI thing—a character called Vee whose every interaction with the player currently feels like a robotic tutorial—out back and put it out of its misery. At least the original run of Skate games understood that the human element of skating—that back and forth you have with others over sick tricks and the friendly put-downs over gnarly crashes—was central to the sport and way of life. I don’t even care if the team reheats that Coach Frank (played by Jason Lee) bit from Skate 3, just please get Vee out of my headset and life, please.

Skate will never be punk, not in any real and tangible way that’ll impress folks. And that’s fine. Punk is an attitude more than a status or fashion choice. You can’t buy it, nor will you find it in a free-to-play live service game from EA. Let’s be real.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t have a good ol’ punk time with Skate still. The punk movement didn’t spring from nowhere after all. It formed as a counter-culture under hegemony, one dedicated to clawing back spaces for those on the margins and creating opportunities for artistic expression for folks who are typically drowned out or forgotten. As long as Skate—which has thrown the doors open to a massive playerbase interested in cruising the streets of San Vansterdam and making it their own—continues to make space for honest-to-god community, there’s nothing precluding it from having its own little punk moment down the line, even if the game itself may never live up to the moniker.

Moises Taveras is a struggling games journalist whose greatest aspiration in life at this point is to play as the cow in Mario Kart World. You can periodically find him spouting nonsense and bad jokes on Bluesky.