Published by Electronic Arts in 1987, Skate Or Die! is a multi-event skateboarding game that was developed in-house. It remains a decent game to play to this day.

The game has five individual events, which you choose between on the skate shop screen. Here you can also spend any money you’ve made in competition, to improve your boards and equipment. Most importantly, though, you need to go into the skate shop to register your player name (by selecting “Sign In“, then entering player names), and then pressing fire on “Go Compete“. If you don’t do that, you can’t select “Compete All” on the selection screen.

There are two events on the half-pipe: freestyle and high jump, both of which are played separately, and two downhill events called downhill race, and downhill jam. The fifth event is pool jousting, in an empty swimming pool. The aim is accumulate points and money by doing well in the individual events.

The downhill races look the most interesting, with decent graphics and smooth scrolling. The half-pipe games are pretty good when you figure out the controls, and the pool in the jousting game looks like someone vomited pixels over it until it was eventually approved by the art chief… The gameplay in pool jousting is okay, though.

Skate Or Die! is a fun game to get into, but does need an investment of time to learn how to play properly. You can load it up and mess around with it for a bit, but you’re unlikely to get far – unless you’re good at the game already. If you’re prepared to give Skate Or Die! a few hours, it can reveal some well-designed and enjoyable gameplay.

The best way to learn now to play the game properly is to register eight player names and compete in each event. If you set the game up properly you’ll get to control eight single-player competitors yourself, one after the other. Since the games are short (and pressing fire does speed things up), you get to play through an entire sub-game fairly quickly. And in the process you can figure out how to play the individual events properly. Which is worth doing because Skate Or Die! has gameplay that rewards whose who are capable of getting good at it.

Tip: One thing I noticed was that choosing “Goofy” style controls for the downhill sections helped, although the jury is still out on whether regular controls are better. At least the option is there, and it makes a difference to how your brain processes the controls.

Overall, Skate Or Die! on the C64 is a fine game that has weathered the sands of time well. All five events are great as either single or multi-player games. It’s another challenging party game too, IMHO.

Initial disk and cassette releases used multi-load to load in the individual events. There have been Easyflash and cartridge file releases* of this game made since, which vastly speed up the multi-load. Only play the disk or cassette versions if you don’t mind waiting (or use ‘Warp’ in VICE to skip the loading).

*= At the time of writing there seem to be an issue with the cartridge version crashing at certain points. Digging deeper seems to lead to ‘internet drama’, so I’m not even going to go there…

Skate Or Die! was also released for Amstrad CPC, Apple IIgs, MS-DOS, Wii and ZX Spectrum. A sequel, called Ski Or Die!, was released in 1990.

More: Skate Or Die! on Wikipedia
More: Skate Or Die! on CSDb