Skate 3 came out on May 11, 2010 in North America (May 13 in Europe and Australia) for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. It moved the series to Port Carverton, a city split into three districts: Downtown, with ledges and rails; University, with banks and open plazas; and Industrial, with a huge quarry. It shipped with Skate.Park, an object-dropper park editor, plus online team modes and Hall of Meat, the bail mode that later made the game famous on YouTube.
EA Black Box closed in 2013, and the series went quiet for over a decade. Skate 3 didn’t. A 2014 wave of YouTube videos about its ragdoll physics and glitches led EA to reprint discs. Xbox One backward compatibility followed in November 2016. The servers went down without notice around 2015–2016 and came back just as quietly before E3 2018.
Why Skate 3 is the center of this site
For most of its life, modding Skate 3 meant a jailbroken console or an emulator. In 2026 that changed quickly:
- June 2026: skate3recomp statically recompiled the Xbox 360 executable to native code for Windows, Linux and macOS. In July, v2.0 added a native Direct3D 12 and Vulkan renderer.
- Summer 2026: the community built tools that read and write Skate 3’s world format directly (ArenaBuilder, DlcBuilder), so maps that only ran on modded PS3s can now be converted to the PC build.
- Late summer 2026: Android and iOS builds of the recomp appeared, along with a Rust and Bevy reimplementation that loads its own portable
.skatemap format.
The full story, with dates and credits, is in the Skate 3 modding history.
Platforms and formats at a glance
| Platform | World format | How mods load |
|---|---|---|
| PS3 / RPCS3 | .psf streams in DIST_* folders, packed in EA .big (often named .big.edat) |
Replace files under dev_hdd0/game/BLUS30464 (US) or BLES00760 (EU) |
| Xbox 360 / Xenia | .xsf streams + .xsm/.xmm/.xss/.xst manifests, in .big DLC packages |
RGH/JTAG, or DLC folders in Xenia |
| skate3recomp / SK8-Engine | Xbox 360 form | .big DLC packs in the dlc folder, or through the Level Loader |
| Rust engine | .skate (SKATE01–15) |
Drag onto PLAY.bat, or pick from the in-game map menu |
skatemods converts maps between these formats automatically. See map conversion.