Nobody expected much of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. Its developer, Neversoft, had nearly made a bass-fishing game instead, and its first demo was a level from a Bruce Willis shooter with the hero put on a skateboard. People who saw it asked, “You just do tricks? You just skate around? That’s going to get old,” Neversoft’s Scott Pease remembered. The studio hoped to sell 250,000 copies. In Britain Computer and Video Games reviewed it under the headline “All hail the best skateboarding game in videogame history”, and it went on to sell millions and to give Activision a game a year for the next seven years.
Fast facts
- Developer: Neversoft, Los Angeles; about thirteen people, Pease said.
- Publisher: Activision.
- Released: PlayStation, autumn 1999; called Tony Hawk’s Skateboarding in Britain and Europe.
- Conversions: Nintendo 64 (Edge of Reality) and Dreamcast (Treyarch, for Crave) in 2000, as well as PC and Game Boy Color.
- Skaters: real professionals, among them Tony Hawk, Bob Burnquist, Geoff Rowley, Chad Muska, Bucky Lasek, Kareem Campbell and Elissa Steamer.
- Sequels: a new Tony Hawk’s game every year from 2000 to 2006.
How it plays
A run lasts two minutes. In that time the player skates round a level looking for things to ollie off, grind along and launch from, and the score comes from tricks chained together into combos. Computer and Video Games gave its readers an easy one for the first level, a warehouse: “tear down the left hand ramp and hit X to ollie onto the rail. Hold Triangle to grind along it, then X to dismount”, then ride the half-pipe, “hit X again to ollie into the air and then Square to clear the pipe with a combo”. Each face button had its own job: ollies, flip tricks, grab tricks and grinds.
The career mode unlocks the levels one by one. Each has five videotapes to earn, Edge explained: some for high scores, one for a set task, such as knocking over five “No Skateboarding” signs, and one hidden somewhere in the level. Three of the eight levels after the warehouse are competitions, where the player has to finish in the top three to go on. The levels moved across America, from a school in Miami and a shopping mall in New York to a downhill run in Phoenix and Portland’s Burnside skate park, with a hidden level at Roswell. Two players could share the screen, in contests where, as Computer and Video Games noted, “skateboarders don’t race”. In Graffiti mode both skate the same park at once, and a rival can rob you of the points for a spot by “pulling a more outrageous trick off the same bit”.
The music was the other thing people remembered. The game played licensed punk and rock tracks: Computer and Video Games picked out the Dead Kennedys and Suicidal Tendencies, and Brazil’s SuperGamePower the Dead Kennedys, Primus and The Suicide Machines.
Tony Hawk
The skater on the box was chosen late. Activision looked for a famous name and settled on Tony Hawk, who had played games growing up and liked Neversoft’s demo; the studio faxed him its trick list and asked him to make it “legit”. While the game was being finished, Hawk landed the first 900 in competition, two and a half turns in the air, at the X Games that summer. Edge explained him to British readers as skateboarding’s Ayrton Senna, “in terms of pure ability”. With so little press interest, Neversoft’s president, Joel Jewett, drove early versions round skate parks in his pick-up truck and let the kids play. The Neversoft entry tells that story in full.
Reception
Edge gave it seven out of ten in the autumn of 1999, calling it “one of those rare success stories” and “easily the finest skateboarding game around”. Its complaint was the hardware: “the PlayStation cannot handle the environments Neversoft has asked it to draw without the odd polygon break-up”. Computer and Video Games made it one of the month’s big hitters, and in Brazil SuperGamePower called it “o melhor, mais rápido e mais animal jogo de skate de todos os tempos”, the best, fastest and wildest skateboarding game of all time. N64 Magazine gave the Nintendo 64 conversion 86% in 2000. According to the figures Wikipedia gathers, the PlayStation version won a Platinum award in Britain for sales of 300,000 copies, and the game had sold 3.5 million by 2001.
The series
Neversoft added something each year. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 (2000) brought in manuals, balancing on two wheels along the ground to link tricks that would otherwise stand alone, and “a comprehensive skate park editor”; Edge gave it eight out of ten. Pro Skater 3 (2001) added the revert, which, as Wireframe later put it, made combos “longer, and much higher-scoring”. Pro Skater 4 (2002) was, for Edge, “simply more of the same”, and Tony Hawk’s Underground (2003) wrapped the skating in a story mode that Edge found tawdry, with missions in which the player could drive vehicles round the streets.
In 2007 Neversoft took over Guitar Hero, and the skating games eventually passed to other studios. In 2020 Vicarious Visions remade the first two games as Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2. Playing it online, Wireframe’s Ian Dransfield decided that “the soundtrack is still a banger”, and noted that the remake gave the first two games the revert, “only added in THPS 3 in the real world”.
Sources
- Edge issue 77, Autumn 1999, p. 80: review of Tony Hawk’s Skateboarding (PlayStation, Activision, Neversoft, £40; Senna; the training level and eight more courses, three of them competitions; five videotapes per level, including the “No Skateboarding” signs and a hidden tape; polygon break-up; seven out of ten).
- Computer and Video Games issue 216, November 1999: review (“All hail the best skateboarding game in videogame history”; £33.99; the warehouse combo; the school in Miami; Graffiti mode; the Dead Kennedys and Suicidal Tendencies).
- SuperGamePower (Brazil) issue 68, November 1999, pp. 45–46: review (the skaters; the Dead Kennedys, Primus and The Suicide Machines; videotapes; three one-player and three two-player modes).
- N64 Magazine issue 41, May 2000: review of Tony Hawk’s Skateboarding for the Nintendo 64 (86%, as listed in issue 42); Edge of Reality as developer.
- Edge issue 90, November 2000: Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 review (manuals; the skate park editor; eight out of ten).
- Edge issue 118, Christmas 2002, p. 76: Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 review.
- Edge issue 131, Christmas 2003: Tony Hawk’s Underground review (the backstory; vehicles in missions).
- Edge issue 178, August 2007, pp. 56–59: Neversoft studio profile (bass fishing; the Apocalypse demo; Tony Hawk and the trick list; the 250,000 target; the skate-park tour; the 900; about thirteen people), as cited in the Neversoft entry.
- Wireframe issue 43, September 2020: Ian Dransfield on Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 (the soundtrack; the revert “only added in THPS 3”).
- Sega Retro, “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater” (web, secondary): the Dreamcast conversion by Treyarch for Crave Entertainment, 2000; the skaters and courses. https://segaretro.org/Tony_Hawk%27s_Pro_Skater
- Wikipedia, “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater (video game)” (web, secondary): release dates; two-minute runs; the Game Boy Color and N-Gage versions; the ELSPA Platinum award and 3.5 million sales by 2001; the 2020 remake by Vicarious Visions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Hawk%27s_Pro_Skater_(video_game)