Skatesterre Brings Arcade Skating Back With a Pro Skater's Touch

An Old-School Feeling With a New Face

Not every skateboarding game needs physics-based ankle breaks and stamina meters. That was the starting point for Headup CEO Dieter Schoeller and the team at Goon Squad when they set out to make Skatesterre, an arcade skating game now finished and heading to Xbox. Writing on Xbox Wire, Schoeller explained the core motivation clearly: skateboarding games have drifted hard toward simulation over the years, and the breezy, trick-heavy feel of the genre’s early classics got left behind somewhere along the way.

The reference points the team kept returning to tell you everything about where their hearts are. Schoeller named Skate or Die, Dave Mirra, Grind Session, and the early Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater titles as the spiritual benchmarks. Those games share a particular rhythm. Players feel competent almost immediately. The control schemes reward instinct over muscle memory built across dozens of frustrating hours. The developers describe it as a “pick up and play” quality, and recapturing that was, in Schoeller’s words, their “ultimate goal.”

For a small indie project, that is a serious target to chase.

Building With a Pro Skater

Rather than reconstruct that feeling purely from nostalgia, Headup brought in professional skateboarder Sterre Meijer as a collaborator. The game is named for her, and her involvement went beyond lending her name to a title screen. According to Schoeller, Meijer’s experience and passion directly shaped both the gameplay and the sense of authenticity running through the project. Her personal style also informed the character customization system, which is one of the ways Skatesterre tries to feel current rather than purely retro.

That combination of old-school arcade feel and a real skater’s perspective is an interesting approach. Plenty of licensed skateboarding games have featured pro riders over the years, but genuine design collaboration at the indie level is rarer. Schoeller frames it as a meaningful creative partnership rather than an endorsement deal, and the specificity of her influence on gameplay suggests the development went deeper than a photo shoot and a signature board model.

Modern Bones Under Retro Skin

Skatesterre runs on Unreal Engine, and the team says they used its latest features to bring quality-of-life improvements that the original arcade classics, for all their charm, simply did not have. The goal was never a pixel-for-pixel recreation of 1999. It was to preserve the feeling while sanding down the rough edges that come with age.

That balance is genuinely tricky to get right. Too much modernization and you lose the looseness that made those games so fun. Too faithful to the originals and you end up with something that feels more like a museum exhibit than a game. Schoeller acknowledges the challenge directly, noting how difficult it was to align all the pieces on what he calls a “true indie project.”

The early THPS games in particular set a high bar. They are remembered fondly for good reason, and several attempts to revive that specific arcade energy over the years have landed with varying degrees of success. Skatesterre is betting that pairing that nostalgic framework with Meijer’s authentic skateboarding perspective can make the combination feel fresh rather than derivative.

What to Expect

The game is now finished, according to the Xbox Wire post, and is coming to Xbox as part of the ID@Xbox program. Players who grew up grinding virtual rails in the early 2000s will find familiar footing here. The intuitive control scheme, the emphasis on flow over friction, and the focus on making players feel skilled quickly are all deliberate callbacks to what made that era of skating games so widely beloved.

For anyone who has spent time with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 and 2 and wished more developers were chasing that particular feeling, Skatesterre looks like the most direct answer to that question in a while.