Skateboarding games have been a core genre of gaming since the '80s, and while the scene has mainly been dominated by either Tony Hawk’s ser🔯ies of skateboarding games or EA’s Skate series, there have been plenty of other skateboarding games worthy of merit. Better still, there are plenty of skateboarding games that are a bit weird.

Whether it’s due to the control method used to perform tricks in-game, the actual tasks involved beyond just performing tricks or the overall aesthetic of the game, some skateboarding games are completely bizarr🅠e. Here are some of the best examples.

10 ꦗ Evolution Skateboarding 🎶

GameCube | PlayStation 2

On the surface, Evolution Skateboarding looks just like any other clone of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, released a few years after the Birdman’s seminal skating series. The controls are similar, the overall career progression and goals share plenty of overlap, and there’s even a licensed rock and metal s🍃oundtrack that wouldn’t sound out of place in the Pro Skater series.

It doesn’t sound that weird, until you get to the boss fights, which🐼 pit you against a truck running rampant, a tank shooting up the place and even a giant crab/spider hybrid in one level themed after Castlevania. The game itself isn’t that fun to play, but Evolution Skateboarding’s ideas and swings are definitely among the weirdest of the genre.

While most didn’t knowingly play Evolution Skateboarding, a lot of people did play the game’s engine, as it was used for the skat♓eboarding minigame in Metal꧂ Gear Solid 2: Subsistence.

9 𒊎 G♓o! Go! Hypergrind

GameCube

The sixth generation of consoles began to push the graphical boundaries that gaming was capable of, and one of those innovations was cel-shading. Building off the foundations of Jet Set Radio and others, many games tried to emulate the comic book/anime style in video games, but one that happened to fly under the radar 🥀for a lot of people was Go! Go! Hypergrind.

Developed by a small team within Atlus, collaborating with animation studio Spümcø, responsible for Ren & Stimpy, Go! Go! Hypergrind follows a bunch of origi🐓nal cartoon characters trying to become Spümcø’s next mascot. Somehow, the audition process involves taking a skateboard and getting involved in as many mishaps ꧅and accidents as possible.

8 🐠 Skate Att𓆉ack/Skate City Heroes

PlayStation 2 | PSP | Nintendo Wii

Another skateboarding game that popped up after t𓂃he incredible success of Tony Hawk’s ⭕Pro Skater, Skate Attack (or Skate City Heroes, depending on the version you’re playing) is set in a futuristic world that players can fully explore. You can customise your playable character from one of six choices too, which is good news for anyone who can’t get on the deck without some kind of create-a-skater feature.

So what makes Skate Attack different from other skating games? Well, your best mate has been k🤪idnapped by an evil robot called Virus, so that’s not fun. On top of t♑hat, while there are the usual skateboarding tricks, you’ll also be able to shoot robots, ride drones and use weapons like the laser lasso to try to make your way through the game’s levels.

Skate Attack/Skate City He🐻roes💦 was available on PS2, PSP and Wii, with the Wii version also boasting Balance Board support.

7 ✤ Yanya Caballista: City Skater

PlayStation 2

If you were to just look at screenshots of Yanya Caballista: City Skater, you’d think it was just an anime-inspired skateboarding game, and you wouldn’t entirely be wrong. Every character looks like they’ve been lifted from the pages of a skate෴boarding manga, complete with the amazing cel-shaded graphics, while the gameplay sees you coming into conflict with an evil group of ghosts called the Gawoo.

So what makes Yanya Caballista so weird? 💛The release of the game on PS2 came with its own finger deck that could be attached to the PS2’s analog sticks, which allowed players to use the s🌳ticks as if they were a real skateboard. It’s a bit of a tough game to learn the controls for, but it’s certainly an ambitious way of emulating the skateboarding experience in gaming.

6 Ollie King 💎

Sega Chihiro

What some people tend to forget about Tony Hawk’s series of video games is how the game’s development was inspired by Sega’s Top Skater arca✅de game, with the Neversoft developers heading over to a local bowling alley during their lunchtime for research purposes. While Top Skater has something of a legacy unto itself, Top Skater’s spiritual successor, Ollie King, has practically been lost to time.

Another arcade skateboarding game, Ollie King, laun♌ched in 2004 and saw players riding the cabinet’s built-in skateboard to try and win some races, SSX-style. What makes Ollie King so weird isn’t so much the game itself, a𒉰s it’s a fairly standard racing game with skateboards, but the development behind the game. Ollie King used the Sega Chihiro hardware, which was based on the Xbox, but the game was never ported to the actual console.

Speaking of the Sega Chihiro arcade board, The House of the Dead 3 and Outrun 2 were developed for arcades using this board, before being ported to the original Xbox. Meanwhile, Crazy Taxi 3 received the opposite treatment, getting an ar🌳cade port after its Xbox release.

Other games, like SEGA Golf Club and Ghost Squad, would receive console ports much later, while a planned Xbo꧋x port of Virtua Cop 3 never materialised.

5 🧜 Orange County

PC

Far from being a skateboarding game based on The O.C. (we’ll get to that), Orange County is a strange and unsettling take on skateboarding. You know, strange🌟 and unsettling, like the song choice for the season two finale of The O.C. Developed by Nicholas Brancaccio, Rachel Hwang and Nick Grayson for the 2019 Haunted PS1 Summer Spooks game jam, Orange County plays like Dogtown mixed with Blair Witch.

As the unnamed skater, you’re d🧸ropped into a creepy, procedurally generated version of Orange County, where, , you’re surrounded by “the ever-circling specter of Elon’s children”. Also, cars. There’s a bafflingly large number of cars that you're trying to dodge, with one determined cop car♔ in particular trying to knock you down. Not very gnarly, dude.

Moving back to The O.C. and skateboarding, there was an official O.C. skateꦇboarding game you could play on Fox.ꦗcom for a few years, which sees you basically trashing the Cohens’ backyard. It’s been removed from the website for nearly two decades at this point, . More modern TV shows need random video games, is what we’re saying.

4 Tech Deck Skateboa⛎rding

Game Boy Color

If you want the best in finger-fidgeting gadgets, you want to get yourself a Tech🌱 Deck, but naturally, Tech Deck had some competition for your hand’s attention when the Game Boy started blowing up. 'If you can’t beat them, join them', said some Tech Deck CEO at the turn of the millennium, presumably, greenlighting a Tech Deck-themed skateboarding game to launch on the Game Boy Color in 2001.

The aptly-titled Tech Deck Skateboarding sees players skating through 40 different levels across ten different skateparks. You’re collecting more branded Tech Deck boards, perforꦐming tricks to score points and racing against the clock the entire time. That all sounds great, until you look at your character, realise you’re some kind of detached thumb thing and recoil in horror.

3 Spongebob&rඣsಞquo;s Surf & Skate Roadtrip

Nintendo DS | Xbox 360

Licensed skateboarding games are clearly not a new thing, but perhaps one of the weirdest ♏of all is Spongebob’s Surf & Skate Roadtrip. The idea of Spongebob in a game isn’t weird, but how the hell is old Spongey managing to effectively ride any kind of board when he’s that far under the water? Speaking of that, how the hell are there e♛ven waves?

Spongebob’s Surf & Skate Roadtrip sees the yellow boy and the rest of his friends recounting a recent road trip, where they spend plenty of time shredding on those boards. Released on both the Xbox 360 and the Nintendo DS, both games feature two differe🦩nt c𝔉ontrol methods, but the end result is the same: racing through various courses and performing tricks.

2 🔴🏅 Tanuki Sunset

PC

Longboards are technically different from skateboards, given the size difference between the two, but you’re still skating when you’🐬re on a longboard, so technically it’s still skateboarding. If you have a problem with that, take that up with our cute raccoon assistant. While Tanuki Sunset isn’t the most technical game, it’s one of the weirdest skatꩵing games of all time, purely because who taught this cute animal how to skate?

Playing as the radical raccoon Tanuki, you’re determined to find yourself on the cover of FISH, the best longboarding magazine i𝐆n the land. To accomplish this goal, you’ll need to weave between traffic on roads that are inexplicably 𓃲floating in the air and located within this chilled-out, vaporwave aesthetic. It’s an endless runner with a bit more input, but it’s at least different and better than something like Tony Hawk’s Downhill Jam.

1 🏅 Perfect Stride

PC

In a different world, many people would have heard of Perfect Stride, as it would have made it out of alpha and actually received an official release on PC, but the project was seemingly abandoned mid-development. However, the developers, Arcane Kids, have left the website and trailers for the game up online, giving player💜s a peek into what could have been the most bizarre skateboarding game ever made.

A first-person skating game that, , would use “old-sc✨hool FPS movement exploits” for its gameplay, Perfect Stride would’ve been set in a world where Tony Hawk didn’t hꦕit the 900 at the X Games in 1999, meaning “corporate skateboarding” never came to be. Naturally, this leads to an immortal time wizard rising to power and making everyone immortal, leaving you to explore a dystopian Earth searching for the last bullet with which to kill the wizard. The fact that this was never released? We were robbed.

At one point, th🐠e alpha build of Perfect Stride that's no longer available, but if you're genuinely curious about Perfect⭕ Stride, .