TheRetroArcade
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Joined: Feb 2026
Joined: Feb 2026
When I first got my hands on High On Life 2 last year, I was blown away by how well it captured the essence of skateboarding. Yes, it’s a video game, so there are some liberties taken with it, but it felt right in a way that feels familiar to skating game fans – even in a totally different perspective and genre. With large, skateable objects meticulously placed, paired with some great first-person shooting thanks to the hilarious Gatlians, it’s a mechanical change that gives High On Life 2 a truly one-of-a-kind feature, something we’ve genuinely never seen a developer try before.
This also makes High On Life 2 feel like a much faster game than its predecessor. By essentially swapping it out for your sprint button, and increasing your overall agility, the skateboard feels like an extra limb you never knew you needed – one that allows you to grind on rails, jump over objects, or even as a projectile against enemies.
Now, with release nearly here, I was able to connect with Chief Design Officer Erich Meyr to talk more about how the idea behind having skateboarding as a traversal (and combat) mechanic within a first-person shooter came about – and it turns out it was something the team had been noodling on since before the first game arrived.
“The earliest inspiration for the skateboard came back in High On Life when Concept Artist Sean McNally drew the bounty hunter riding a roly-poly type of alien,” Meyr tells me. “Unfortunately, a level-specific mechanic like that wasn’t in our timeframe on the first game, but good ideas tend to haunt us forever. When we were brainstorming for High On Life 2, the idea scuttled its way from our collective unconscious, and we thought it would be even better as a normal skateboard that helps ground your character as an Earthling.”
Skateboarding has embedded itself into the world of gaming over the years – there have been countless Tony Hawk games; Skate has returned in force; indie games like Session or Skate Bird bring their own flare to the skate video game genre. Now High On Life 2 is building this out as a first-person experience and is taking cues from games from both the past and the present to help it really feel distinct. But one of the big inspirations isn’t technically a skateboarding game at all:
The earliest inspiration for the skateboard came back in High On Life when Concept Artist Sean McNally drew the bounty hunter riding a roly-poly type of alien.
“Three of us on the dev team were lucky enough to work on Sunset Overdrive at Insomniac Games, and while doing first-person skating is a bit different then Sunset’s grind-heavy parkour, I really wanted to capture a similar environmentally driven flow,” Meyr explains. “While working on Sunset Overdrive I was addicted to traversing across Sunset City; I’d often travel all the way across the city to play my work, instead of using developer shortcuts, just to explore and enjoy the traversal team’s amazing job. When we started seriously considering having a skateboard in High On Life, I knew deep in my cobwebbed soul we should strive for that feeling, even if it inflated the skateboard into something much larger.”
As far as digging into the classics, the team went back and analyzed a lot of Tony Hawk games to figure out what would work (and not work) for first-person skateboarding. For example, Tony Hawk’s controls don’t work as an FPS, but served as a baseline inspiration for what skating should feel like: “It really got me thinking about layering in vert ramps, half pipes, and grinds. I played a ton of Session as well, though as much as I love it for being insanely technical, we were going for a much more simplified control scheme and couldn’t fit in something like their awesome trick system.”
During the research and conceptualizing phase of High On Life 2, Meyr was surprised to find that there were practically no first-person skating games available, beyond some mods for Skate. Then he stumbled upon an indie game called Griptape Ba...Read more: Full article on news.xbox.com
What do you think about this?
This also makes High On Life 2 feel like a much faster game than its predecessor. By essentially swapping it out for your sprint button, and increasing your overall agility, the skateboard feels like an extra limb you never knew you needed – one that allows you to grind on rails, jump over objects, or even as a projectile against enemies.
Now, with release nearly here, I was able to connect with Chief Design Officer Erich Meyr to talk more about how the idea behind having skateboarding as a traversal (and combat) mechanic within a first-person shooter came about – and it turns out it was something the team had been noodling on since before the first game arrived.
“The earliest inspiration for the skateboard came back in High On Life when Concept Artist Sean McNally drew the bounty hunter riding a roly-poly type of alien,” Meyr tells me. “Unfortunately, a level-specific mechanic like that wasn’t in our timeframe on the first game, but good ideas tend to haunt us forever. When we were brainstorming for High On Life 2, the idea scuttled its way from our collective unconscious, and we thought it would be even better as a normal skateboard that helps ground your character as an Earthling.”
Skateboarding has embedded itself into the world of gaming over the years – there have been countless Tony Hawk games; Skate has returned in force; indie games like Session or Skate Bird bring their own flare to the skate video game genre. Now High On Life 2 is building this out as a first-person experience and is taking cues from games from both the past and the present to help it really feel distinct. But one of the big inspirations isn’t technically a skateboarding game at all:
The earliest inspiration for the skateboard came back in High On Life when Concept Artist Sean McNally drew the bounty hunter riding a roly-poly type of alien.
“Three of us on the dev team were lucky enough to work on Sunset Overdrive at Insomniac Games, and while doing first-person skating is a bit different then Sunset’s grind-heavy parkour, I really wanted to capture a similar environmentally driven flow,” Meyr explains. “While working on Sunset Overdrive I was addicted to traversing across Sunset City; I’d often travel all the way across the city to play my work, instead of using developer shortcuts, just to explore and enjoy the traversal team’s amazing job. When we started seriously considering having a skateboard in High On Life, I knew deep in my cobwebbed soul we should strive for that feeling, even if it inflated the skateboard into something much larger.”
As far as digging into the classics, the team went back and analyzed a lot of Tony Hawk games to figure out what would work (and not work) for first-person skateboarding. For example, Tony Hawk’s controls don’t work as an FPS, but served as a baseline inspiration for what skating should feel like: “It really got me thinking about layering in vert ramps, half pipes, and grinds. I played a ton of Session as well, though as much as I love it for being insanely technical, we were going for a much more simplified control scheme and couldn’t fit in something like their awesome trick system.”
During the research and conceptualizing phase of High On Life 2, Meyr was surprised to find that there were practically no first-person skating games available, beyond some mods for Skate. Then he stumbled upon an indie game called Griptape Ba...Read more: Full article on news.xbox.com
What do you think about this?