Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater Hopes

With the announcement of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 I have high hopes but also some significant concerns due to the recent track record of the series. Yesterday I had a project piece to write, but this morning I cannot get it out of my head. The details so far are that Vicarious Visions is working on the game and it is targeting the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC via the Epic Games Store. It also is coming out fairly soon, with the trailer announcing that it releases on September 4th, which apparently a demo of the Warehouse level coming out before that for anyone who pre-orders the game.

There are as far as I can tell three main products available, the standard game is roughly $40 regardless of platform. The digital deluxe edition is roughly $50 and adds some retro stuff for create a skater mode, retro costumes for Tony Hawk, Rodney Mullen and Steve Caballero, and The Powell-Peralta Ripper visualized as a skater. All of those things really only matter to those of us who are 40 somethings and grew up in the era when Powell-Peralta and the Bones Brigade were kings. Finally you have the physical collectors edition that is roughly $100 and comes with the game, digital deluxe goodies and a legit Birdhouse Skateboard Deck. This is intriguing because in theory the game is $50 and based on my research Birdhouse decks seem to sell for around $60 so you are seemingly getting your moneys worth with the edition. As much as I loathe physical editions of games, it is a temptation just to have it so I can hang the deck on my wall.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater was a big series for me, and I owned the original on PlayStation, the first sequel on Dreamcast and when the third game came out for PlayStation 2 it was among one of the first titles I purchased. You have to understand I was a little skater punk during my pre-teen years and I even went to see the Bones Brigade when they did an exposition at the fair grounds. I was a horrible skater, but I loved everything about the scene and even patterned a lot of my early musical tastes based on what I was hearing in the background of skate videos. The soundtrack to Streets of Fire is still freaking amazing even though everything else about it is 110% cringe these days.

I grew up playing games like Skate or Die, 720 and T&C Surf Designs which were generally horrible representations of skateboarding as a whole but the best we had access to. So when I got my hands on the first Tony Hawk game I was completely enthralled. I spent countless hours in Free Skate mode just doing random tricks and figuring out lines to take in the timed modes. The Dreamcast version of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 however elevated everything to a new level, because the graphics at least for the time were completely amazing. I got caught up in create a skater mode as I leveled up and maxed out all of the traits, allowing me to do some silly stuff with the game. The second game even had a create a skate park mode, allowing you to craft levels from a bunch of prefab components. It reminded me of my early years building entire fingerboard skate parks with cardboard and index cards, using bic pen barrels as coping.

I really want the remaster of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 and 2 to be amazing. I loved the original games, but I also have to take a moment to express my doubts. Not all of the games have been great, and Activision doesn’t exactly have a great track record with the franchise. In 2012 the released Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD which was in theory a remix of the best levels from the first and second game, but fell short on a lot of the mechanic aspects of the game. Everything felt very floaty and the moves seemed to lack the weight that the original console games by Neversoft had. In 2015 they released Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 which seemed to take these floaty mechanics and double down on them with moves that felt more like you were ice skating on concrete than actually riding on top of grippy urethane wheels. To make matters worse the game attempted to dip its toes into the games as a service model and required you to connect to lobby servers in order to play.

I hope they do in fact recapture the glory of what made the first few games in the series amazing, and give us a legitimate clean game without the entanglement of always on play and microtransactions. There is already a video that analyzes the game play we have seen so far, and the Youtuber offers concerns that the animations thus far appear to be more akin to what we were seeing in HD than in the first or second game. Ultimately at the end of the day it will come down to how it plays, and we won’t know that until September. I have a lot of hopes though, because I really want this game to be good. The Skateboarding genre evolved after THPS into more simulation games like the Skate series and the indie darling Skater XL. These are absolutely not my jam, because in truth all I really want is the arcade fun that the Tony Hawk series gave me. So here is hoping we can get a return to form for that series.