Skate or Die: Quit Yer Yakkin' And Go Practice
Skate or Die: When Your Commodore Had More Attitude Than You
In 1987, skateboarding offered freedom, rebellion and the possibility of returning home with considerably less skin than you left with. Skate or Die offered much the same experience, except your mum’s carpet stayed bloodless and the main casualty was a joystick.
There was one small obstacle before any of this excitement could begin. You had to load the tape. Nothing prepares a person for dangerous downhill competition quite like sitting perfectly still, watching a cassette player and wondering whether the computer has noticed.
Skate or Die arrived on the Commodore 64 in 1987, developed by Electronic Arts in the United States. It wasn’t an arcade game brought home. That confusion is understandable, though, because an arcade machine was lurking behind the whole idea.
Producer Don Traeger had been inspired by Atari’s 720°, the skateboarding arcade game released in 1986. That machine actually used the warning “SKATE OR DIE!” when a swarm of killer bees came after you. Apparently skateboarding wasn’t dangerous enough without introducing a small airborne enforcement department.
EA’s Skate or Die was a separate game, not a conversion of 720°. It took the skateboarding theme home and gave it a different structure, with five events and a cast of characters who looked unlikely to provide a reference for your first Saturday job.
The behind the scenes story is more interesting than “someone noticed skateboards were popular”.
EA founder Trip Hawkins wanted a piece of the success enjoyed by Epyx’s sports games. EA was already publishing games, but Skate or Die became its first internally developed title. People leaving Epyx helped provide the talent for that move. A disagreement involving Epyx’s handheld console project and Atari formed part of the backdrop. That console would eventually become the Atari Lynx.
So, tucked behind a game about falling into concrete bowls was a little piece of industry history. EA was moving beyond putting other people’s games in boxes and building its own development operation. Not bad for something containing a character called Poseur Pete.
The credited team included designers Michael Kosaka, Stephen Landrum and David Bunch. Landrum and Bunch also handled programming, while Kosaka and Nancy Fong received art credits. Don Traeger produced it, and Rob Hubbard supplied the music.
Those names deserve remembering. The computer didn’t spontaneously develop a purple mohawk and an interest in pool jousting. Somebody had to make all of this happen within the limits of an eight bit machine.
The five events were freestyle ramp, high jump, downhill race, downhill jam and pool joust. Freestyle asked you to look skilful. Downhill asked you to remain upright. Pool joust suggested that the quickest way to resolve a sporting disagreement was to knock the other person over.
This was not a reverent simulation of athletic discipline. It was skateboarding filtered through the sort of imagination that thought a drained swimming pool needed more organised violence.
Holding the whole thing together was Rodney Recloose, the skate shop owner with the purple mohawk and a face resembling Rodney Dangerfield. His son, Bionic Lester, had a green flattop and the general air of someone whose school report contained the phrase “disruptive influence”.
Poseur Pete and Aggro Eddie completed the welcome committee. Nobody was called Sensible Colin. Sensible Colin had gone home to revise.
For skateboard fans, there was a genuine connection on the packaging too. The cover, designed by Steve Lyons, featured Steve Caballero. That mattered. Caballero wasn’t an advertising department’s idea of what a skateboarder might look like. He was the real thing.
The cover supplied credibility, while the title did the shouting. Skate or Die wasn’t promising a pleasant afternoon and a certificate of participation. It sounded like something you might write on a school exercise book before being asked to explain yourself.
Not every reviewer surrendered to the attitude. Computer Gaming World’s 1988 review recognised its appeal to teenage skaters and older players who preferred keeping their limbs intact. Dragon’s reviewers gave it two stars out of five. Even then, the world contained people who could look at pool jousting and decide it lacked something.
Then there was the music.
Rob Hubbard’s C64 theme is one of the reasons people still talk about this game. It had rock energy and sampled sounds coming out of a machine that also spent its time displaying READY.
The Commodore 64 had 64 KB of RAM and a SID sound chip with three voices. Hubbard helped make those constraints sound less like a technical limitation and more like a challenge somebody had foolishly issued to him.
Sample playback could exploit the SID’s volume register, turning rapid changes into audible sound. The result was a computer doing rather more than a casual glance at its beige plastic suggested.
Hubbard’s career did not stop at the skate shop. His earlier C64 work included Commando, Monty on the Run and International Karate. He joined EA in 1988, later became Audio Technical Director, and worked on games including Road Rash and Desert Strike.
He left EA in 2002 and returned to England. His music subsequently reached tribute performances and orchestral arrangements, and Abertay University awarded him an honorary degree in 2016. There is a pleasing journey there, from making a home computer sound dangerous to receiving academic recognition for it.
The wider team’s present day whereabouts are less clearly documented in the sources available for this piece. Better to credit their work properly than invent a cheerful reunion in which everyone now owns a vineyard.
The game itself carried on travelling. Computer versions followed, and Konami brought it to the NES under its Ultra Games label. Ski or Die and Skate or Die 2 arrived in 1990.
There was even a later comeback that never reached the shops. Criterion, the studio behind Burnout, worked on a new Skate or Die project for PlayStation 2 and Xbox before it was cancelled in 2003. Development attention went instead to Burnout 3: Takedown. The boards stayed behind, but the enthusiasm for spectacular collisions clearly found employment.
For Commodore owners, though, the original has a particular pull. A chunky keyboard. A joystick held together by optimism. PRESS PLAY ON TAPE. Someone warning you not to touch anything while it loaded, as though breathing near the computer might upset the process.
Old’s Cool’s Skate or Die cassette for Commodore 64/128 comes with instructions, is in very good condition and has been tested as working.
https://olds-cool.co.uk/products/skate-or-die-1987-commodore-64-128-cassette-instructions
The instructions are worth having. In 1987, opening the manual was usually what happened after confidently pressing every button and achieving absolutely nothing.
Skate or Die still captures something lovely about that period. Skateboarding felt unruly, computers felt full of possibility, and neither came with a guarantee that you knew what you were doing.
You didn’t need to be good. You needed a board, or a joystick, and the stubborn belief that the next attempt would be different.
Usually it wasn’t. You had another go anyway.