Social media star Sterre Meijer on getting her own skateboarding game, online hate, and, weirdly, being mistaken for AI

Sterre Meijer is not much of a gamer. She’d rather be outside skating than sitting indoors with a controller, and she admits she has never been particularly interested in skateboarding games either.

That makes it all the more remarkable that the 21-year-old Dutch skater and social media star has just become the face of one.

Skatesterre is an old-school arcade skateboarding game we first looked at a few weeks back, built around Meijer’s name, appearance and unmistakably feminine style. Rather than simply dropping another generic skater into a familiar formula, developer Goon Squad and publisher Headup approached Meijer and her brother Tijmen with the idea of making her the central character.

It was not a project the siblings had been chasing. In fact, as Tijmen explained when the pair spoke to The Escapist, it arrived almost entirely out of the blue.

“They approached us via email,” he said. “Initially, they were already working on some kind of skate idea for a game, but how are you going to make that unique? The same as Sterre’s social media, you just have a totally different style by having a female character.”

The developers travelled from Germany to meet the pair in Zeeland, on the south coast of the Netherlands, bringing early ideas for what the game might become.

“They showed some examples they had in mind and said they wanted to make a game for us,” Tijmen said. “We were like, ‘Yeah, why not?’ It sounded super cool.”

For Sterre, the concept required little persuasion. “They didn’t have the game at all,” she clarified. “They just had the idea to make the game. So I approved, like, ‘Okay, we’re going to make the game about me,’ and then they started making it.”

Although Meijer left most of the mechanics to people who understood games better than she did, she was far more particular about the person standing on the skateboard.

“The character was what I had the most opinions about,” she said. “The game, I’m not really a gamer, so I was like, let that be how it is. But the main character, I was like, ‘I want the hair like this. I want it to be that colour. I want my outfit to be like this.’ Those girly kinds of things were what I thought were important.”

Getting the digital Sterre right was not a simple job. Tijmen estimates the character went through around 10 iterations, with each version undergoing further adjustments to make her look less like a conventional skateboarding-game avatar and more like his sister.

“She was definitely the most critical about that,” he said. “Every time it was, ‘Can we do it more girly? Can we do it more like this?’”

That became especially important after an early test version was shown off.

“I heard a lot of people say it didn’t really look like me and that it looked kind of manly,” Sterre said. “I thought the same thing. We said that, and then they made it look even more like me. We tried to make it look like me as much as possible and give it that girly vibe.”

Female characters have appeared in skateboarding games before, but they have often been placed inside aesthetics built primarily around male skaters. Sterre wanted Skatesterre to offer something different, including clothing inspired by her social media posts, colourful boards and outfits that players can unlock.

“When I wanted to play games, what made it most fun was being able to unlock stuff for the character, like outfits,” she said. “Because I’m really girly, that’s what I liked. I thought it was really important that we did that because I want girls to play the game and finally have a girly character they can skate with.”

“I’ve never really been a gamer, and I also never liked skate games,” she continued. “But I think if there had been a skate game that was kind of girly, then I would have played it. I think it’s super cool that there is going to be one.”

The game draws heavily on the accessible, combo-driven skateboarding games that defined the genre’s early popularity. Tijmen described its skating as being influenced by titles such as Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and Skate, while its visual presentation takes inspiration from Session.

Yet the siblings’ most important contribution was ensuring the lead character did not feel like a male skater with longer hair.

“Skating is so male-dominated,” Sterre said. “I understand because it’s kind of a scary sport. A lot more girls are doing it than when I started, so there has been a lot of growth, but it is still not even close to how many guys are doing it.

“It is really cool to have a skate game that is about a girl and is about me. That is just amazing. I hope girls will like it and that more girls will skate because of it, but I also hope the guys will like skating with a female character.”

For someone who does not spend much time playing games, Sterre is fully aware of how unusual it is to have one named after her.

“Almost everyone is a gamer, has gamed or is gaming,” she said. “When I tell people, ‘I’m going to get my own game,’ they’re like, ‘What?’ It is really cool to say that you get your own game.

“I cannot wait to play it with friends, film it and make content with it. In 10 years, I hope it is going to be a really big game, especially for girls. Maybe there could be a sequel or virtual reality.”

Whether it will turn her into a committed gamer is another matter.

“We’ll see,” she laughed. “I don’t think so, but I think I’ll definitely like it.”

“She might start streaming on Twitch,” Tijmen added. “Maybe she will stream some games, but she will not turn into a gamer herself. She will always be skating.”

Sterre agreed: “I’m not really good at sitting inside and gaming.”

The skater behind the screen

Skatesterre will introduce Meijer to an audience that may know nothing about her millions of social media followers or the skating clips that built them. For those who encounter her through the game first, she is likely to look like a creator whose popularity has been carefully engineered.

That is exactly the perception Sterre has spent years pushing back against.

“I think people think I’m an influencer,” she said. “You could call it that, but I’m really into sports. In my life, I really train for my tricks. It is so much more work.

“I don’t think I’m a typical influencer who posts pictures. I want to be seen more as a sporty girl and a skater girl because that is more me. I share that on social media because I like the aesthetic, and because it makes me able to make my job out of my sport.”

Tijmen puts it more bluntly.

“A lot of people just see, ‘Oh, you’re an influencer,’” he said. “It is like, no, she is a sports person.”

Sterre had been drawn to extreme sports long before she had an audience. She grew up surfing, windsurfing and skating, with Tijmen often teaching her and filming her progress. Social media eventually offered a way to turn those interests into a career, but it did not create them.

“I’ve heard a lot of people say, ‘You skate for social media,’” she said. “But before social media even existed, I was extremely into extreme sports.”

Even now, she regularly hears the same accusation at skateparks whenever a camera appears.

“When I do a trick that I think is scary, filming it gives me more motivation because I’m being filmed,” she said. “It is also cool to see the progress, so I film a lot of my tricks.

“At the skatepark, I hear all the time, ‘You’re doing it for social media.’ I’m like, yeah, why wouldn’t I film it for social media? My whole legs are bruised. If I were only doing it for social media, I probably wouldn’t skate. I would only take pictures or something.”

Her willingness to show the failures as well as the successful landings has become part of her appeal. While many skating videos present an apparently effortless final trick, Sterre is happy to include the falls, bruises, failed attempts and slapstick accidents that came before it.

“I always thought it was cool to show progress,” she said. “It is cool to show how much it takes.”

She has so far avoided any injuries serious enough to keep her away from skating for an extended period, although that does not mean she has escaped unscathed.

“There are a lot of scars and bruises,” she said. “I’ve had a skateboard in places you don’t want it to be, but nothing where I had to take a long break.”

“She has been lucky,” Tijmen added. “It has never been so bad that she had to stop skating. Hopefully it never will be.”

Hate, harassment and the people convinced Sterre is AI

Being visible online has brought Meijer opportunities she never expected, including a video game carrying her name. It has also placed her in front of the internet’s vast supply of angry, suspicious and incessantly misogynistic strangers.

Her videos attract the familiar demands that a woman should “get back in the kitchen,” accusations that her skating is fake and, increasingly, comments insisting that Sterre herself has been generated by artificial intelligence.

“Lately, I have been getting a lot of those,” she said. “‘You’re AI. How do we know this is real and not fake?’”

It is a particularly modern form of disbelief. Sterre’s appearance, the polished presentation of her clips and her skating ability are apparently now enough for some viewers to conclude that the woman on screen cannot exist and that she’s arrived from a prompt in Seedance or something.

Tijmen joked during the interview that his sister’s flexible ankles and ability to recover quickly from falls were further proof that she was “not real.”

Sterre’s preferred response to this side of the internet is generally not anger, but ridicule.

“When I see a negative comment and I want to reply to it, I always reply sarcastically or with a joke,” she said.

Her family helped establish that approach early on, encouraging her not to treat every hateful comment as a personal attack.

“Tijmen and my family have always told me that maybe it is even good because it makes it bigger,” she said. “Of course, when you see hate comments about yourself all the time, it does something to me, but it does not take a big part of my life. I am not going to cry about it.

“I have never cried about a comment. I just know people are always going to have an opinion. It does not matter what you do. If I skate, if I put on normal clothes or different clothes, people are always going to hate. That is what social media is.”

“People are going to hate,” Tijmen added. “You just have to accept that.”

While Sterre may be able to laugh at the comments, her family does not dismiss every risk associated with her visibility. Tijmen has been involved in her skating and content since the beginning, and the pair decided to keep the business within the family after outside managers began showing interest.

“We got a lot of managers and people who wanted to be involved,” he said. “But it turned out it was best if we kept it within the family and did everything together.”

That role includes protecting Sterre from situations in which millions of followers can become a real-world security concern.

“My family does not really let me go to the skatepark alone,” she said. “I have followers and people who know me, so I always go with my friends filming. I never go alone, and I think my family would not allow me to.”

“She got invited by YouTube to come to Tomorrowland with a bunch of creators, but without anyone of our team, ” Tijmen tells me, “So she got approached by a few fans, and that made us realize that she can never be alone. We realised there should always be either me, a filmer or someone else around, just to be sure.”

Sterre does not present herself as a prisoner of her audience. She accepts that recognition is a consequence of the path she chose, and insists that she still enjoys meeting people who know her work.

“It was my own decision,” she said. “When I started posting and becoming someone people know, that was my decision. I like it when people know me. I’m not annoyed by it. It is cool.”

Her account began taking off when she was around 16. A video filmed by her mother, which Sterre initially did not even want recorded, became her first viral hit.

“I posted it and I did not have any followers at all,” she said. “It got something like seven million views, and a few videos after that did too. Then I had around 10,000 followers, and I was like, ‘Whoa, I have followers.’”

That comparatively modest milestone showed her there might be an alternative to pursuing extreme sports entirely through traditional competitions.

“I realised I could do something with my skating,” she said. “It did not have to be competition. It could be through social media.”

The actual moment it began to look like a genuine business opportunity came a couple of years later.

“When I was around 18, I hit one million followers,” she said. “Then I was like, ‘Okay, maybe this thing can work out. We can actually make a big business out of this.’”

Skatesterre is the clearest expression of that business so far: a social media identity becoming a character, and a character becoming a video game. Yet beneath the follower counts, brand deals and accusations that she is not even human, Sterre still sees herself primarily as the girl who wanted to skate.

The game may introduce a fictionalised version of her to millions of players, but the real Sterre is more interested in what it might do for the next girl who picks up a controller – or a skateboard.

“I hope the girls will like it,” she said. “I hope more girls will skate because of it.”

And when those players inevitably fall, fail and have to try the same trick again, at least they will be controlling a character created by someone who understands exactly how that feels.

Skatesterre is available now for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch 2.

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