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Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater celebrated its 25-year anniversary on September 29, 2024. Below, we look back at how it began, and its influence as an unconventional platformer.
The 1990s were a wild time for skateboarding. Professionals like Tony Hawk were pushing the limits of what seemed possible by nailing unbelievable stunts for the first time in history–the loop of death, a 16ft ollie between water towers, and the first 900. Little did we know that these stunts and the people behind them would become part of the foundation of one of the greatest platformers of all time: Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.
The 1999 classic has officially turned 25 this year. Its legacy of incredible arcade gameplay–the one that spawned eight sequels, millions in sales, and countless kickflips and heelflips–is still as prevalent today as it was when the X Games were at the height of their popularity. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater brought skateboarding to a new level of cultural significance as people of all ages, kids especially, found their way to real-world skateboarding after shredding through the digital remains of an old abandoned mall.
Tony Hawk and other skaters weren’t just turning skateboarding into a phenomenon, they were turning it into an extreme sport. Skateboarders were practically superheroes while ollieing through traffic and grinding across power lines in the real world. The Birdman wanted to replicate that feeling in a game when he set out to partner with a studio. The demo from Neversoft made anyone–not just skateboarders–feel like they were superman with a skateboard.
“Activision called me and I knew right away that was exactly what I wanted to work on,” he said in a 2017 interview with Jenkem. “It was already fun to play, you didn’t have to know how to skate, and the controls were easier to understand.”
Birdman’s romp from a Warehouse in California to a secret military facility in Roswell, New Mexico is seen as one of the best skateboarding games of all time for how it captured the culture of skating with its music and style, but another reason Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater became such a sensation was because its exploration and platforming are some of the most invigorating in the genre. The simple movement, especially for a release that came just years after Super Mario 64, was as sharp as any other platformer out there.
“We never wanted you to accidentally do something you didn’t want to do. Even if that was cool. We wanted it to do exactly what you were telling it to do,” said Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater producer Scott Pease in a 2019 interview with The Ringer. “When you actually physically push that button and then you get snapped into that rail, it feels like you’re doing something, versus the game kind of playing itself.”
Sure, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater is a sports game, and a skateboarding game if you’d categorize that as a whole genre, but its core mechanics set Tony Hawk besides the likes of Mario, Astro Bot, and the Fall Guys. Like any great platformer, the core of the game is about navigating tricky jumps with precision timing, and chaining your movements together into one impeccably smooth line. Like those heroes and their catalog of wild adventures, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater had its fair share of arcade zaniness.
Grinding across the top of a movie theater’s showtime display in Minneapolis and doing an ollie over a cable car in San Francisco were just a couple of things that you’d never see in the real world unless Red Bull set up a stunt for it. Those were simply challenges and fun things to do while riding around in an open space.
Each of those early parks was a seamless combination of exploration, platforming, and eventually style-themed challenges where each two minute long run provided a different kind of fun. First you’d just explore to get the lay of the land, then you’d try and find all the secrets, and finally you’d find the fastest and most efficient way to collect everything and earn the most points in a level. It was a recipe for replayability.
Each following game did a little to make their parks feel more alive. Pro Skater 3 brought pedestrians, Pro Skater 4 brought animals, and Underground actually let you get off your board to explore things up close.
The original Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, built on the framework of Neversoft’s earlier project Apocalypse–which featured Bruce Willis blowing things up–had straightforward movement mechanics. There was a limited set of tricks and the primary way to combine tricks was to grind and wall ride. Later games would improve on this, bringing in the manual, natural ways to combine tricks, and better game development technology that made riding a skateboard in a digital space tighter.
The combination of fantastic movement and open playgrounds was widely appealing. It made Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater a game that almost anyone could jump into. The tricks were important, but the ability to go your own way was the real attraction.
“A lot of people did say, ‘You can’t really do that. You can’t just make a game that’s pure tricks. It’s not going to work, no one’s done that. It’s not real, man, you’d run out of speed.’ So we had this big internal debate,” Pease said in a separate interview with Polygon. “We just started to lean into the natural act of skating in a real environment, going anywhere, exploring, finding your own lines and being creative.”
The history behind the studios that have made the Tony Hawk Pro Skater series–including the games that would eventually drop the Pro Skater title and the eventual 2020 remaster–have disbanded. Neversoft, the studio behind the 1999 hit, disbanded in 2014. Vicarious Visions, the team behind the 2020 remaster, was folded into other Activision Blizzard teams.
Even though the team that is behind it is no longer working on the series, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 was a gigantic success. It sold more than a million copies in the span of two weeks. Players have continued to dig into the games create-a-park mode, despite little support for the remasters online modes.
The love that players–not just skateboarding fans–have for the simple joy of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater gameplay is incredible. They were devastated when reports that a important core” franchise for it today, sparking some hope that more remakes and new games could be in the future. Under new ownership at Microsoft, perhaps it’s a franchise that will be revisited. It would be fantastic to see a new game continue to evolve the incredible premise of a skateboarding platformer, but the legacy of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater will forever live alongside Mario.
“Thanks to Activision, Neversoft (RIP) and all of you that played THPS in those formative years,” Tony Hawk said in an Instagram post to commemorate the games 25th anniversary. “I’m not supposed to tease anything else about the future of the series, but there will be a future.”
There is as much demand for fantastic platformers today as there was in 1999 as Astro Bot, Super Mario Odyssey, and even Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 have shown us. Players, both new and old, would immediately feel right at home on the digital concrete of a new Tony Hawk game, especially if The Birdman is still making sure the game experience lives up to the hype of real-world skateboarding.
