In Top Skater, players stand on a skateboard-like platform which swung side-to-side or tilted, manipulating the actions of the avatars in the game.

[1] Kenji Kanno went on to create the Crazy Taxi series, which has similar character art design and music.

Top Skater also served as a basic foundation for later skateboarding games including Activision's Tony Hawk's series.

[5] The soundtrack of the game consisted entirely of these songs by the punk rock band Pennywise: The developers selected Pennywise because they felt punk rock was both the most appropriate genre for the skateboarding theme and the best choice to excite players, and some members of the team were fans of the group.

[5] The game debuted at a Sega arcade show, held at the Otaku Entertainment Plaza in Kamata, Tokyo, on March 15, 1996.

Crazy Taxi (1999) has a similar style to Top Skater, notably the character art design and type of music.

Ollie King, published in 2004 and developed by the creators of the Jet Set Radio series, contains much of the same gameplay as Top Skater and used a nearly identical arcade cabinet.