Arguably the Best Entry in the Series, Skate 2 Is Oddly MIA on Modern Consoles

I am a big fan of the Skate series. Like a good chunk of the Skate community, I find Skate 2 to be the best entry in the franchise. It took the successful aspects of of Skate, then amplified them, and it also fixed what needed to be fixed. It even added the ability to get off your board, though this aspect wasn’t necessarily expertly implemented.

Unfortunately, when Skate 3 released, EA Games was trying to capitalize on the online multiplayer craze of the time, and in the process they lost some of that Skate magic while also not really nailing the new target they’d been aiming for.

After leaving the Microsoft ecosystem and defecting back to Sony with the PlayStation 4, I begrudgingly said goodbye to the Skate franchise, since there was no backward compatibility on the PS4 and I no longer had an Xbox 360. It wouldn’t be until I snagged a cheap Xbox One S from a pawn shop about three years ago that I was finally able to play Skate again.

The problem is that Skate 2 isn’t backward-compatible. Skate and Skate 3 are, but for some reason Skate 2 is not part of the family.

Forced to choose between Skate and Skate 3, I landed on Skate 3. I admittedly played a fair deal of it, but all the while I couldn’t help but lament that it wasn’t Skate 2. I’ve been spoiled… I know…

Time moved on and I stopped thinking about Skate. I eventually got a gaming PC, which afforded me the opportunity to check out newer skateboard titles like Skater XL and Session. And since the Xbox line didn’t really have any must-play exclusives (for me, anyway), my Xbox One S just ended up sitting on a shelf in the bedroom, unplayed for almost a year.

Until I recently fired it back up, going so far as to reactivate my Game Pass subscription (since I was apparently back on an Xbox kick). Unfortunately, Skate 2 had not been welcomed into the backward-compatible ecosystem in the intervening years. But even more unfortunate is that, even with EA Play, Skate 2 is missing in action.

“What’s the deal?” I thought.

And so, I did a Google search, assuming perhaps there was some music licensing agreement that had expired or something else silly like that. Surely there must be an easily explainable reason as to why Skate 2 has seemingly become the black sheep of the Skate family. But I found nothing, aside from an overly snarky reddit thread asking this same question.

Although you can’t play Skate 2 on Xbox’s EA Play subscription, you can still purchase Skate 2 from the marketplace. But since it still isn’t backward compatible (although the bookending Skate and Skate 3 are), I would still need an Xbox 360 to even play it.

So what in the heck is actually going on here? For the life of me I can’t figure out why Skate 2 wouldn’t be, at the very least, available to play on EA Play, the game service from the publisher of the dang game, when the other two games in the series are. Moreover, since both of those two games in the Skate series are backwards compatible on the Xbox Series X|S, why in the bloody heck is Skate 2 not?

Perhaps I’m not asking the right questions, but maybe there just isn’t a right question at all.

But sweet sassy molassy, what I wouldn’t give to be able to play Skate 2 again without having to buy a two-generation-old console. Sadly, this cube will just have to remain ungleamed.