After a barren decade in the category, skateboarding video games are back at the centre of popular culture hype. A high-profile Skate 4 announcement followed news of the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater reboot earlier this year, and with skateboarding set to make its Olympic debut in 2021, the sport's skyrocketing popularity still looks some way off hitting fever pitch. In other words, this seems like a good time to make a skate-centric video game. And this time around, Skate and THPS aren't the only players. 

Buried beneath the mainstream fanfare and big-studio teasers is Skater XL, the skater-owned, skater-made video game headed by an Australian developer, Dain Hedgpeth, and his trusty sidekick, the former DC Shoes skate category manager Jeff Goforth. While Skate 4 may still be three or four years from completion, Skater XL is making its way to consoles right now. We caught up with Dain, who is now based in California, and Jeff, Skater XL's director of marketing and industry man, to chat about the game's focus on physics and realism, the divisive control scheme, any rivalries with Session, what the Skate 4 announcement meant for them, and the importance of the community when making a video game in 2020.