EA officially announces a new Skate game is in early development

Yes, you read the title correctly. EA is bringing back beloved skateboarding franchise Skate. Two of the members of the original Black Box dev team returned during EA Play to make the announcement but weren’t quick to call it Skate 4 or even give it a title.

The game is very, very early days but given the cry for a new Skate has been so loud, EA likely felt they should just let the people know they’re doing it. No details were given on the project but it sounds like a lot of the original team has returned to make the new title in the series. This is pretty significant because the team had been disbanded in 2013 when Black Box shut down.

For those out of the loop, Skate was a popular skateboarding franchise last-gen. It combined some of the arcade-y elements of Tony Hawk but added a level of realism as well to make it more tactile and engaging. Think of it like the Forza Horizon of skateboarding games.

In 2010, EA released Skate 3 which by all accounts was super beloved. Its fun and sometimes glitchy gameplay allowed it to live on for quite sometime, spawning a devoted cult following. Despite this, it wasn’t enough for EA to feel like the series was worth continuing and developer Black Box was shut down in 2013.

Since then, fans have been dying for a fourth game in the series. It’s been one of those mythical games no one thought would ever see the light of day, like a Half-Life 3. But now, it’s real and it’s coming.

We’ll likely have to wait until next June to hear more details or see a first-look at the game. For now, you can probably expect the new title in the skateboarding franchise to debut on next-gen consoles when it releases a few years from now.