Someone ported this classic Xbox 360 game to Android, and it runs on budget devices

We’ve seen a raft of Xbox 360 games unofficially ported to PC in recent months, and Skate 3 is one of these titles. The popular skateboarding game received two fan ports a few months back, but what about Android? We now have good news on this front.

Developer Buku313 released an unofficial Android port of Skate 3 on GitHub this week, dubbed Skate 3 Mobile. This is a fork of the recent Skate3Recomp project for PC. Unlike many other Xbox 360 ports, which often still emulate the GPU, both of these Skate 3 ports have a native Vulkan renderer. In plain English, you can expect fast performance compared to typical fan ports of many Xbox 360 titles.

In fact, the developer reports that Skate 3 for Android is playable on the ANBERNIC RG406V. This Android handheld has a Unisoc T820 chip with an aging CPU setup (four Cortex-A76 and four Cortex-A55) and modest Mali-G57 MC4 graphics. It’s worth noting that this playable performance is achieved with the performance preset, which also turns the internal resolution down to a jagged 512 x 288. However, there is a quality preset that offers a far more pleasant 720p internal resolution, albeit at the expense of some heating. Still, this scalability means there’s a good chance your mid-range Android phone can run this port.

Installing Skate 3 Mobile is pretty easy, as you sideload the APK from GitHub and then choose the “Select My Skate 3 ISO” option. From here, you choose your Skate 3 Xbox 360 ISO via the file picker, and the app will take a minute to extract the game data. You can then tap “Play Skate 3” to get started. You’ve also got a decent variety of options at this juncture, including a virtual gamepad, support for physical gamepads, various frame rate caps, several aspect ratio choices, and mod support.

This unofficial port is understandably very unpolished right now due to its early nature. The app either froze or crashed before gameplay on my AYANEO Pocket S Mini, but worked on my Retroid Pocket G2. But even the latter device saw a few crashes, occasionally necessitating the ISO-picking process all over again. Nevertheless, my brief gameplay experience revealed extremely smooth performance at a near-locked 60fps, albeit with the fan running a little louder than usual. It’s also encouraging to see the developer releasing several bug-fixing updates since the initial release less than 24 hours ago.

The creator has admitted to using OpenAI’s Codex to “assist” with development, but confirmed that they reviewed the changes and performed all testing. They don’t seem to have a lengthy track record of GitHub projects, either. Thankfully, the developer said it is an open-source project, so you can comb through the code yourself and even contribute to it. I’d still recommend people unfamiliar with sideloading avoid this for now just to be safe. But if you really want to play Skate 3 Mobile, I’d recommend installing this on a secondary Android device that doesn’t have important personal data.