Skate Hooligans

The runner genre has a reputation for being a game about nothing — hold still, wait for a shape, move. Skate Hooligans does not really argue with that. What it does instead is make the shapes arrive faster than you can think, which turns out to be a different game entirely.

You skate three lanes of a city street. A policeman is behind you, and he does not get bored. Left and right move you between lanes, up jumps, down ducks into a slide, and there is no fourth verb — no brake, no throttle, no way to buy yourself a moment. The board accelerates from the first metre and never stops accelerating, which is the single design decision the whole thing rests on. Every run is winnable at the start and unwinnable by the end. The only question is where on that curve you personally fall apart.

The scenery moves as you go. Downtown means buses, open manholes, pedestrians and the occasional postman. The Subway swaps them for train carriages, passengers and high-voltage lines strung overhead. There is an Amusement Park and an Airport beyond that, and — this is the part most pages about the game get wrong — you do not buy your way into them. You collect your way in, picking up themed objects mid-run: gather enough toy aeroplanes in the funfair and the Airport opens.

It was released on 12 March 2017 by Gemioli, an independent studio that has been making 3D browser games since roughly 2014 and that also built Relic Runway. The developer wrote it on a custom WebGL engine rather than an off-the-shelf one, and the whole game compresses to about 110 KB of code — which is why it starts almost instantly. It found an audience: by February 2018 the developer reported 1.3 million monthly players and 70 million runs, and it currently sits at 4.1 out of 5 from 22,335 votes on Playgama, with another 839,000 plays logged on Y8.

The jump button is an ollie, and somebody had to invent it

Here is something the game never mentions and almost nobody thinks about. On a bike or in a car, jumping is a ramp problem. On a skateboard it is a genuine puzzle, because the board is not attached to your feet. Jump straight up and the board stays on the ground. For most of skateboarding's history, getting a board into the air meant reaching down and grabbing it.

The fix came from a teenager in Hollywood, Florida. Alan Gelfand, born 1963, was skating bowls and empty pools in the late 1970s when he worked out how to come off the lip with no hands — the board seemingly following him up. A local skater nicknamed him "Ollie", and the trick took the nickname. SkateBoarder magazine printed step-by-step instructions in its January 1979 issue, and the name stuck to the motion rather than to the man.

What makes an ollie work is a sequence, not a leap. You snap the tail down against the ground, which pops the nose upward. You jump. Then you drag your front foot forward along the grip tape, and the friction pulls the board up and levels it out underneath you. Three actions, tenths of a second apart.

Gelfand's version lived on vertical walls. The one that mattered came on flat ground, and it came from Rodney Mullen, at the Rusty Harris contest in Whittier, California, on 27 June 1982. Mullen's own assessment of what he had done is the least modest and most accurate thing anyone has said about it: without the trick, he reckoned, skating might simply have run out of places to go. The flatground ollie opened a second, elevated plane to do tricks on. Everything street skating became — handrails, ledges, stair sets, the kickflip Mullen invented the following year by flicking the board into a spin mid-ollie — is built on top of it.

Which brings it back to the up arrow. Skate Hooligans hands you a lane system for the horizontal problem and exactly one tool for the vertical one, and that tool is a trick a fifteen-year-old figured out in a drained swimming pool. It is not decoration. Roughly half the obstacles in the game can only be answered with it.

Where the coins go: boards, faces and five boosters

Coins do three jobs, and only one of them affects how you play.

What you buy	What it changes
Skateboards — Flame, Rocket, Wave, Racer, Idol and more	Appearance. Nine-plus designs, no measured effect on speed
Characters — unlocked with coins or Lucky Box tokens	Appearance. Different hooligans, same physics
Booster upgrades	The only purchases that change outcomes

The five boosters are the magnet, the heart, the coin multiplier, the police car and the taxi. The last two are the flashy ones — you end up in a vehicle that flattens whatever is in front of you, which is a pleasant reversal given who is chasing you. The magnet and the heart are the useful ones. Upgrading a booster extends its duration or its strength, so the sensible order is heart, then magnet, then everything else, and buy the cosmetics with whatever is left over.

Games like Subway Surfers, and where this one sits

Search for games like Subway Surfers and you get a hundred results, mostly identical. It is worth being straight about the lineage: Subway Surfers came first, in 2012, and it is the game that fixed the format — three lanes, a chase from behind, swipe controls, a shop. Skate Hooligans arrived in 2017 and does not pretend otherwise.

What it changes is the texture rather than the skeleton. The four locations chain into each other through collection rather than sitting in a menu. The boosters are permanently upgradeable, so a hundred short runs build into something. And the skateboard is not just a skin: because the jump is an ollie and the duck is a slide, the two vertical inputs feel like they belong to the same object, which is more than most reskins manage.

If you want the same reflex loop with a different frame, Relic Runway is the same studio's take on it — a temple runner where the collectibles are relics. For the same twitchy, one-more-go pressure without the running, Hunter Assassin and Save the Kitten sit in the same corner of the arcade category. And if you like the part where coins turn into upgrades, Superbike Hero builds a whole championship on it.

Playing Skate Hooligans unblocked

There is no download, no plugin and no account. The game is a single HTML5 page running on Gemioli's own WebGL engine, which is why the whole thing weighs about 110 KB compressed and loads before you have finished reading this sentence. That also means it works on a locked-down school Chromebook exactly as it works anywhere else — press play above and it runs inside this page.

One honest note: the build here is the 800×600 desktop version. The original supports touch and swipes on a phone, but what we serve is the keyboard build, so use arrow keys and a real screen. Nothing is missing from the game — the lanes, the four locations, the boosters and the daily missions are all there — but your fingers belong on the keys.

1. Pick a lane and stop thinking about lanes. Left and right arrows, or A and D. Lane changes are cheap and instant; they are not the skill.
2. Jump the solid things. Up arrow. Barriers, benches, low traffic — anything that does not have a gap underneath it.
3. Slide under the hanging things. Down arrow. Signs, gantries, the subway's overhead lines.
4. Take every coin that is roughly on your way. Coins buy boards, characters and booster upgrades. They are not points — your score comes from distance and multipliers.
5. Grab the boosters, then upgrade them. The shop turns a three-second magnet into a much longer one, and one extra life into more.

Five things worth knowing before your first run:

• Read two obstacles ahead, not one. The speed curve means that by the two-minute mark, reacting to the thing in front of you is already too late. Look at the far end of the visible road and pre-commit to a lane.
• The magnet outearns the multiplier. A x2 on coins you never touch is worth nothing. The magnet collects lanes you are not even in, so it raises your income and lets you keep your eyes on obstacles instead of on coin trails.
• Upgrade the heart first. It is the only booster that undoes a mistake. Every other one makes a good run better; the heart makes a bad run continue, and continuing is where the distance score comes from.
• Missions are the real score engine. The daily challenges and missions raise your score multiplier, which compounds across every future run. Chasing them is worth more over a week than any single heroic attempt.
• Location objects beat coins. If a themed collectible and a coin trail are in different lanes, take the collectible. Coins are infinite; the objects that open the Airport are not.