Skate or Die

Year 1988, I'm twelve years old and a friend brought a floppy disk to school. On it was Skate or Die by Electronic Arts. That afternoon we sat by his 286 and figured out what this game actually wanted from us.

Skate or Die is a sports arcade set in the world of skateboarding — at that time still a relatively fresh phenomenon that the West was just absorbing, and we in Czechia mostly watched from music videos. The game offers several disciplines: freestyle on a ramp, downhill racing, stick duels, can throwing. It's not one big world, more like a collection of minigames connected to a central shop screen with equipment.

The controls are exactly as chaotic as you'd expect from an arcade from 1988. On the keyboard you had to learn timing for tricks on the ramp — at first it felt like luck, then it started making sense and you'd pull off your first decent trick. That feeling of reward was pretty strong back then. A joystick made things easier, but not dramatically. The game supported CGA, EGA and Tandy graphics, so the result depended on what you had at home. On EGA it looked acceptable, on CGA like abstract art.

What Skate or Die brought was mainly that it existed at all on PC at a time when sports arcades on computers were rare. Skateboarding as a subject was also cool — and the game tried hard to capture that coolness through its whole aesthetic, from mohawks through music to the very title. Today it's obviously aged. The graphics are ancient history, the controls require patience, and the various disciplines have wildly uneven quality. The downhill race is fun, freestyle is frustrating, stick dueling is more of a curiosity.

Today it's played by those who want to feel what PC gaming looked like in 1988 — without sugar-coating and without extra nostalgia. It's a historical artifact that deserves half an hour of attention. Especially if you never got that disk into your hands back then.