When Skate drops into early access on Sept. 16, it won’t quite look like previous games in EA’s cult skateboarding series. It is returning as a free-to-play live service game set in a squeaky-clean open world. It may look entirely different at a glance, but you’ll likely feel like you’re back in the late 2000s once you pick up the controller. That’s because Skate resurrects the heart of the series: Flick-It.
Rather than copying Tony Hawk’s notes, the unique control scheme had players performing tricks by wiggling their right joystick in different directions. It was as if you were drawing tricks. That created a more fluid skating system that set Skate apart from its peers. When creating a new game in the series, senior creative director Deran Chung knew Flick-It had to return. There was just one problem: That would be a huge pain in the ass to pull off.
“The old skate engine was insane. It was Frankensteined of all this crazy stuff. There was no way of resurrecting it,” Chung told Polygon in a video interview ahead of Skate’s release.
The first time some of these tricks were ever done was at our mocap stages.
It’s a bit surprising to hear, because the system itself feels so intuitive from the player’s side. The appeal of the Skate series is that you don’t really have to think about it. There are no long button combo strings to learn. You simply need to flick the stick and some magic will happen. When Chung talks about the system now, he dissects it from an intellectual standpoint, telling me how it scratches the itch of self-determination theory. But at the time, the team was just going with the flow.
“We were not that academic!” Chung said. “It was more along the lines of like, we are skateboarders and this is what feels right to us. I don’t think people had made the analog to skateboarding and self-determination theory at that time. If they had, it was not known to me or to us. It was just this is what feels right as a skateboarder, as a different flavor for a skateboard game than what currently exists.”
As natural as the mechanic felt to the team, it presented design challenges that went against all sensible skating instincts. According to Chung, the system more or less invented new tricks that had the pro skaters brought in to help perform motion-capture dumbfounded.
“The first time some of these tricks were ever done was at our mocap stages,” Chung said. “No one had ever done an ollie 360 inward heel or an ollie 360 hard flip. Why would anybody do that? Doesn’t make any sense, right? But as we were figuring out: it’s a circle and we’ve got a kick flip and we’ve got a heel flip and we’ve got a 360 flip and we’ve got a hard flip. But then do we 360 hard flip? To complete the circle of gestures, you kind of need all of them. So we identified there’s an ollie 360 inward heel and there’s an ollie 360 hard flip on either side of the quadrant.”
“We went to mocap and we’re like, ‘So who can we possibly ask to try these things?’ And so we picked the best dudes in the world, some of our pros from the previous games, and said, ‘Have you ever thought about trying Nelly 360 inward heel flip?’ And they’re like, ‘Dude, what the fuck are you talking about?’”
It’s through that anecdote that you can begin to see how complicated Flick-It would be to simply port over to an entirely new engine – and that’s what the team would have to do if it was going to make a brand-new installment. The original Skate trilogy wasn’t built on EA’s signature Frostbite engine, which was first used to power Battlefield: Bad Company in 2008. A new game would have to jump that gap one way or another, requiring a ground-up rebuild.
That was top of mind for both Chung and tech lead Jon Lawler, both of whom were moved to other teams within EA after Skate 3’s launch. While neither of them had any immediate plans to return to the series, figuring out how they could revive Flick-It became a bit of a side-challenge. Since Lawler was now working in Frostbite regularly, he started trying to recompile Flick-It and the old code base. Chung and Lawler would both keep their eyes on the progress over the years, waiting for the moment where it felt like Frostbite could fully support Flick-It.
That moment eventually came just as other crucial waves were hitting the shore. Fans began turning requests for Skate 4 into a meme and skateboarding was only becoming more popular thanks to social media and its inclusion in the 2020 Summer Olympics. Just as the idea of a new Skate game was becoming smart business for EA, it had become a viable technical reality for Chung and Lawler.
But simply making a 1:1 recreation of a 15-year-old system wasn’t enough. The team wanted to build on top of what came before to bring out the improvisational nature of the mechanic even more. To accomplish that, the team gradually started bolting new ideas around the old code base. That unlocked the potential for techniques like variable speed flips that Chung says the team never could have done previously.
“We had late flips, late kickflips, and late heel flips before. Now we have late basically everything,” Chung said. “So, you could ollie in the air and do a late 360 flip. You could do a late inward heel flip or whatever, but you can also do a slow version of each of those things. You could do a slow held version of each of those things. You could do a slow held version of a kickflip or a 360 flip and then do a late one after that. And nollie versions of all of these things.”
It isn’t just Flick-It that’s been buffed up. Chung notes that the changes go hand in hand with a new approach to animation. Previous games used to blend animations together, resulting in trick sequences that were cobbled together from different motion-capture sequences. The new game uses minimal blending, using uninterrupted takes to capture more idiosyncratic nuances in tricks.
Physics plays a major role in all of this too, as that system has seen its own revamp. Since many of the people who worked on the original games’ physics were still floating around EA, Chung and Lawler were able to reconnect with them and build up their work to support even more trick potential.
“We’ve got way better ways of predicting what’s in front of the skater now than we ever had,” Chung said. “So with a system like wallies, which is basically an ollie where you bash into an object in front of you: We can predict that there’s an object there. So instead of forcing the character to ollie up and over the thing unnaturally or forcing a slam where you ollie too late, you’re now able to wallie off of the thing.”
That level of depth explains how the Full Circle team is able to add more tricks to the game post-launch. Darkslides and impossibles will both come to Skate in later seasons, something that has Chung excited about the new game’s live-service pivot. Some games just add new cosmetics and events across seasonal updates; Flick-It is theoretically powerful enough to add entirely new tricks.
Of course, most casual players probably won’t pick up on these technical nuances. That’s the gift and curse of Flick-It: It’s natural to the point where you don’t really think about it. All that will ultimately matter to longtime fans is if it feels right. (And it does based on our initital impressions.) It may sound simple, but nailing that is one hell of a battle.
