This isn't an emulator or a recompilation. The game's own systems (the skating physics, animation, the streaming city, challenges and audio) are reconstructed as readable Rust from Skate 2's Xbox 360 debug build of January 17, 2009 (sk82_na_m.xex), and run natively on your PC. Requires your own legally obtained Xbox 360 copy of Skate 2 to run, you will be prompted to choose ROM location during first startup.

• The real Skate 2 skating. Flick-It, tricks, grabs, grinds, manuals, bails and off-board play, driven by the game's own physics and animation graphs.
• San Vanelona, alive. The whole city streams in as you skate, with pedestrians, traffic, AI skaters, the original audio and the Music Player.
• Free skate anywhere in the city, straight from the main menu.
• Career (in progress). New Career, missions, challenges, cutscenes and saves. It can't be played start to finish yet.
• Party Play. S.K.A.T.E., Spot Battle and Hall of Meat for two to four players.
• Online. Quick Match, Custom Match and online Freeskate on dedicated servers, with every unranked challenge: Spot Battle, Best Trick, Jam, S.K.A.T.E., Death Race and Hall of Meat.
• Create-a-Skater and the clothing shop.
• Skate.Reel. Edit replays and take photos, and save them as MP4 video or JPEG.

• New netcode. The original sends only controller input and simulates every skater on every console, so any difference between two machines desyncs the whole lobby. Here each game simulates its own skater and streams compact replay frames: other skaters play back smoothly through packet loss and jitter, and challenge rules still run the same on every machine.
• Bigger lobbies. Up to 8 skaters, a Lobby Browser that lists the games on the server, and lobby chat (press T).
• Watch a challenge in progress. Join a game mid-challenge, or pick Leave Challenge in the pause menu, and you wait in the pre-game lobby watching the players still in the challenge as ghosts. They never see you.
• Display Settings. A frame-rate cap (60, 120, your monitor's refresh rate or uncapped), VSync (on: no tearing; off: frames show at once, with the cap still applied), a resolution scale (50% to 200%: above 100% the world renders larger and is scaled down for a sharper picture, below it renders smaller for speed; the HUD always stays sharp), a frame-rate counter, borderless fullscreen (Alt+Enter works too), and switches for PostFX and the fisheye lens.
• Better Party Play. No pedestrians or traffic in the way and your own career skater is in the list to choose from.

• Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit), 64-bit Linux, or macOS on Apple silicon (build it yourself: docs/release/macos.md).
• A processor with AVX2 (Intel since 2013, AMD since 2015) and a graphics card with DirectX 12 or Vulkan on Windows and Linux; any Apple silicon Mac on macOS, through Metal.
• Your own copy of retail Skate 2 for Xbox 360, extracted to a folder: the one that holds default.xex and the game's data folder. A disc image has to be extracted first.
• A controller. Xbox and PlayStation controllers work on Windows; on Linux and the Steam Deck, every controller SDL3 knows works. Skating isn't playable on keyboard and mouse yet, but may be implemented later.

1. Download skate2-windows-x64.zip from the latest release.
2. Unzip it into a folder of your own, for example C:\Games\Skate 2.
3. Run skate2-pc.exe. If Windows says it protected your PC, choose More info and then Run anyway.
4. The first time, select your copy's default.xex. The game remembers the folder.

1. Download skate2-linux-x64.zip and unzip it into a folder of your own.
2. Run ./skate2-pc from that folder and select your copy's default.xex.
3. On the Steam Deck, do this once in Desktop Mode, then add skate2-pc to Steam as a non-Steam game.

What Linux needs (drivers, libraries, the Steam Deck) is in docs/release/linux.md.

There is no download for macOS yet: build it from source, which leaves a Skate 2.app in dist/macos. Open it and select your copy's default.xex the first time. The app starts itself in ~/Library/Application Support/Skate 2, where config.json and saves/ then stay, and it opts into macOS Game Mode (LSSupportsGameMode, macOS 26 and later), which quiets background work while you play. An Xbox, PlayStation or Switch controller works through SDL3, as on Linux. What the build needs, and the parts of the game macOS does not have yet, are in docs/release/macos.md.

• A message names the error and your graphics card, and a report is saved to saves\crash_reports beside the game. Send both with your report. On macOS the report is in ~/Library/Application Support/Skate 2/saves/crash_reports, and a fatal error the app had no message box for is written there too; run Skate 2.app/Contents/MacOS/Skate 2 from a terminal to see what it prints.
• To try the other graphics API, make a .bat file beside the game with set WGPU_BACKEND=dx12 (or vulkan) on one line and skate2-pc.exe on the next, and run it. set SKATE2_NO_MSAA=1 turns antialiasing off.

Choose Online on the main menu and pick a nickname. Releases connect to the project's server. To play on another one, set "server": "host:port" in online-config.json beside the game.

Hosting: skate2-pc --server <ip:port> runs the game in dedicated server mode, on Windows, Linux or macOS. The Linux zip also holds skate2-server, the server alone, for a VPS or any machine without a display. Players join only a server of the same release; --update on either program puts the newest release in place. A server can also run a barebones moderation panel, with chat shadowbans and IP bans: see the server's documentation.

Each time it starts, the game looks for a newer release and offers it on the main menu. Yes downloads it, checks its signature and starts the new version, which then shows what changed. Settings and saves are never replaced. Online play on our community servers needs the newest version.

Everything stays in the folder you run the game from: config.json, online-config.json and saves/. On macOS the app starts itself in ~/Library/Application Support/Skate 2, so they stay there. Replays and photos go to saves/skate_reel/. MP4 export needs FFmpeg with H.264 and AAC: put ffmpeg.exe (ffmpeg on Linux and macOS) beside the game, or on your PATH.

• Create-a-Spot
• DLC support (perhaps even being able to link Skate 3 data)
• Ranked online play
• Online Freeskate activities
• Controller vibration

You need a current stable Rust toolchain (the MSVC one on Windows).

Windows:

.\build-release.bat                 # target\release\skate2-pc.exe
cargo run --release -p skate2-pc    # build it and play from the repository root

Played from the repository root, config.json and saves/ stay there, and git ignores them.

Linux (or WSL, through build-release-linux.bat):

./build-release.sh                  # dist/linux/skate2-pc and dist/linux/skate2-server

The packages it needs are in docs/release/linux.md.

macOS (built and played on Apple silicon; Intel Macs are untested):

./build-release-macos.sh            # dist/macos/skate2-pc, skate2-server and 'Skate 2.app'
cargo run --release -p skate2-pc    # build the game and start it from the repository root

SDL3 builds from source here too, so CMake, Ninja and the Xcode command line tools are needed; the bundle's icon is made with the sips and iconutil that macOS ships. The rest is in docs/release/macos.md.

A build without release-secret.txt makes its own online key, so it plays only on a server run from the same executable (skate2-pc --server). Releases (the release key, the update files and the steps) are in docs/release/auto-update.md. Run the tests with cargo test --workspace; tests that read the original files use SKATE2_GAME_ROOT. Diagnostic runs, traces and research tools are in docs/DEVELOPMENT.md.

• Every system is typed, named Rust that reproduces the original's behaviour. The source of truth is the January 17, 2009 debug build, sk82_na_m.xex: its code and debug symbols are studied as evidence, and no PowerPC code is translated or run.
• Nothing is emulated. Rendering, audio and input use native PC backends: wgpu, cpal, XInput and SDL3.
• The game's assets stay on your machine and load through reconstructed file formats.
• Matching the original is backed by evidence and tests, and every deliberate difference is written down.

This project was written with the help of large language models. They turned research into code and documentation; the behaviour is checked against the debug build's own code and, where it matters, against the original game running. Some things are still partly unfinished, so some features might be missing.

• EA Black Box, for making Skate 2.
• FFmpeg, whose WMA Pro decoder skate2-xma ports to play the game's XMA audio.
• wgpu, winit, cpal, SDL3 and the rest of the Rust ecosystem this is built on.

The source code is MIT-licensed (LICENSE), except the skate2-xma audio decoder, which is LGPL-2.1-or-later like the FFmpeg code it ports (crates/skate2-xma/LICENSE).

This is an unofficial fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Electronic Arts. Skate and Skate 2 are trademarks of Electronic Arts Inc. The repository holds no game executables, symbols or assets: you need your own legally obtained copy of the game.