EA appears to have quickly sniped leaked footage of Skate 4 before it can make the rounds. In other news, have you heard of the Streisand Effect?
First revealed in June 2020, Skate 4 is the forthcoming revival of EA’s long-dormant Skate series, which experts (hi there) say are the best skateboarding sims of all time. Rather than certain other, celeb-branded skateboarding games, Skate and its two sequels put an emphasis on realistic physics. You’d use the thumbstick to pop ollies, or flick it with varying intensity in various directions to pull off, say, heelflips, varial kickflips, three-flips, and so on.
Early—and I mean really early—footage of Skate 4 looks to continue that tradition, kind of. Rumblings about a Skate playtest circulated earlier this week. (Kotaku was not invited by EA to participate in the test.) Yesterday, one user who appears to have been in a session uploaded a 33-second clip to Odysee, the video platform. That link now leads nowhere, the footage gone…but not before GamesBeat’s Jeff Grubb cross-posted the clip to Twitter, where it’s gone on to rack up nearly 200,000 views as of this writing:
Though the footage is muddy, clearly making use of prototype assets, you can make out the trademark Skate gameplay. A skateboarding avatar moves smoothly down a sidewalk, popping flick tricks, a noseslide, even a messy switch-up.
The footage also shows some off-board parkouring, in-line with the realism that underscores the series’ skateboarding mechanics. You can, according to the clip, do a frontflip on flat ground. (Skilled action sports pros IRL can do this no problem.) But trying to do a double flip off a 15-foot-tall ledge seems to result in the player’s skater avatar falling over, grasping their ankles in pain. (Even skilled action sports pros IRL would likely see the same result sans proper training.)
It’s unclear what this brief clip means for the timeline of Skate 4, what it means for when the public will get a chance to see official gameplay, or if EA’s marketing department will eventually stumble upon a genius idea and stylize it as Sk4te. Last year, EA said the game wasn’t ready for “prime time,” preemptively announcing it wouldn’t be at a late-summer showcase. In March, the mega-publisher canceled its big annual summer showcase, which is typically hosted around E3 (also canceled this year). Instead, it’ll “reveal much more about [its] projects when the time is right for each of them,” per a statement given to IGN.
EA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.