Skateboarding sim Session nails a gnarly Steam Early Access kickflip on September 17

Folks, it’s time. Time to don a red cap, grab a plank with wheels and Make America Skate Again. If you grew up in the early 2000s, chances are that you spent many an afternoon playing Tony Hawk Pro Skater while butchering the lyrics to Papa Roach’s Blood Brothers. Eruptions and the moose, the salesmen of my tooth. While Tony Hawk games were bombastic and over the top flights of fancy that would slap gravity in the nipples when given the chance, EA would trot out its Skate series of games years later and focus on a more authentic experience of kickflips and manuals.

We’d get a fantastic trilogy, Tony Hawk Pro Skater games would decline in quality and the genre largely died a horrible death back when Activision decided to Guitar Hero the genre up with a peripheral skateboard that was fooling nobody. Oh, and there was apparently a Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5 but nobody believes that lie. NOBODY.

In the year of our lord Rodney Mullen that is 2019, skateboarding will live again next month when Session does a gnarly nosegrind into Steam’s Early Access. A spiritual successor to Skate in the controls department, Session will feature “true stance-stick controls” that allow you to access each of the appendages that you use to control your falling (or walk, as most call it) as you pull off some rad tricks around New York City brah.

The Early Access version will be primarily set within a 1:1 scale replica of the Big Avocado, with sections dedicated to lower Manhattan, Brooklyn Banks, the Financial District and more spots where security guards really don’t want you to grind a rail. There’ll also be a video editor that will allow you to record all of those sweet moves with a “period-specific, VHS-style visual aesthetic”, or in my case, create a highlight reel where I introduce my nipples to asphalt surfing.

Just remember to always protect your body by breaking your fall with your face. You can’t teach that, it’s pure instinct. Session will hit the rails on September 17 for PC, with Xbox One players getting a taste of it through Xbox Game Preview a few weeks later.

Last Updated: August 14, 2019