In his home in New York City, a developer known only as Justin is quietly building something audacious: a skating video game set in occupied Palestine.
At first glance, Palestine Skating Game sounds like a subcultural oddity — part Jet Set Radio homage, part art-house rebellion. But dig deeper, and it becomes something more profound: a kinetic act of defiance. A protest, not with marches or chants, but with rail grinds, kickflips and beats spun from Arabic electronic music.
The game’s origins are rooted in something more visceral than gameplay mechanics. In 2018, Justin visited Palestine for the first time. “I started in Jerusalem, then went to Bethlehem, Hebron, Nablus, Ramallah,” he recalls. “And it just stuck with me… the sense that people, even under occupation, had this fundamental sanity. More than I feel here in America.” It is not the story most Americans hear.
Trips to Beirut, Kashmir and Cairo followed. But Palestine lingered, especially Hebron, where he met a young Israeli-American soldier patrolling shuttered Palestinian markets. “He was polite,” Justin recalls, “but the dissonance on his face — he knew this was wrong. We didn’t say it out loud. We didn’t need to.”
Resistance through rhythm
The game itself is equal parts tribute and innovation. It is inspired heavily by Jet Set Radio—a cult classic where players evade dystopian police forces on rollerblades while tagging walls with graffiti. But Palestine Skating Game swaps Tokyo’s neon for Bethlehem’s limestone and police robots for Israeli occupation soldiers, tanks, drones and military checkpoints. Every encounter mirrors a lived experience, from Israeli settler gangs to soldiers and checkpoint harassment. Players will be able to skate past the illegal Separation Wall and tag tanks and drones with blasts of colour.
“The music,” Justin hopes, “will be a heavy hitter and the soul of the game.” He has already secured tracks from Hazy Noir, a chillwave group in the West Bank, and hopes to licence household names in the Middle Eastern electronic music scene once they have raised enough of a budget. “If we do it right, people will play the game and think, damn, I didn’t know music like this came out of the Middle East.”
Much like the Tony Hawk Pro Skater franchise, which catapulted punk bands into cultural consciousness, Justin hopes Palestine Skating Game will carry the sound of the region further than many documentaries could.
But building a game from scratch isn’t just romantic. It’s gruelling. Justin handles the modelling and much of the art direction himself. He is no coder — so he has had to rally a loose constellation of programmers from across the region, including a programmer currently in the besieged Gaza Strip.
“It’s painful work,” Justin admits. “These cities — Bethlehem, Hebron, Gaza — they’re so architecturally rich. It can’t feel like some mass produced thing. It has to feel like really intricate levels that bring out the details of a place like Bethlehem or a place like Gaza before the genocide.”
Justin has never been to Gaza, the most difficult city to reach. “But I have friends who live there,” he explains. “Their input is everything.”
The game intricately visualises occupied Bethlehem and Banksy’s Walled Off Hotel. Occupied Hebron, where entire Palestinian-owned shops and markets have been indefinitely shut by Israeli occupation forces, forms another setting in the game.
The prototype of the game already lets players roll through two kilometres of the actual Separation Wall, recreated in 3D with graffiti pulled from real-life photos spanning two decades.
Skating between worlds
The game doesn’t aim to be a polemic. It wants to be fun. Visually and musically thrilling. Cool, even. In fact, Justin wants players — especially young American ones — to come for the fun. But beneath the grind tricks and graffiti bombs, it wants to say something real. “Maybe then they’ll leave with a new image of the region. Something they’ve never expected.”
The game is still under development with a vision for three episodes set in Bethlehem, Gaza and Hebron. One episode will be set in 2022, another post 7 October 2023 and a third in the near future, imagining what a just or realistic peace in Palestine looks like.
The first playable ‘episode’ is slated — tentatively — for the end of the year. Two full levels. A city. A soundtrack. A glimpse of something the world has mostly overlooked.
Justin believes in the project. Because for him — and the community forming around the game — it’s about reclaiming narrative space and showing what life is really like under Israeli occupation, through play not pity. There are not a lot of 3D games that let you be in Palestine, especially ones that aren’t war games. “We want to change that,” Justin says.
In a world where Israel’s occupation of Palestine is often reduced to headlines or hashtags, Palestine Skating Game offers something radical: embodiment. It lets you skate through the streets and encounter lived experiences.
It’s not about winning. It’s about being. In motion. In resistance. In rhythm.
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