TONY HAWK'S PRO SKATER
AS A FRANCHISE, THIS SKATEBOARDING SERIES ELEVATED TONY HAWK, NEVERSOFT AND EVEN THE SUBCULTURE OF SKATING TO A WHOLE NEW LEVEL OF RECOGNITION. WITH THE ORIGINAL PRO SKATER GAMES BEING REMASTERED, WE EXPLORE THE HISTORY OF ONE OF GAMING'S MOST INFLUENTIAL
Have you seen Tony Hawk recently? Not just out and about buying his groceries, but instead rocking his deck, riding a half pipe and trying to slam that infamous 900? With the helmet on and all that vertical air, it’s impossible to spot the difference between then and now, between the Birdman many of us will recognise from the late Nineties and the here-and-now 2020 version. There may be wrinkles around his eyes and silver streaks in his hair, but age hasn’t stopped this public figure from doing what people love to see him do. That’s kind of the feeling surrounding the games his name has been attached to as well, and if the excitement surrounding the release of the remasters for the original two Pro Skater games has proven anything, it’s that there’s both a great thirst for some classic Tony Hawk gaming and clear evidence that some games can age like wine, not cheese.
Of course Tony Hawk wasn’t always associated with the brand. First came Activision, a then-little-known developer called Neversoft and a Playstation rendition of Bruce Willis. “We were working on this Big Guns game for Sony, but that got cancelled and Neversoft nearly collapsed,” says Mick West, one of the three cofounders of the studio. “The company was running out of money, we had something like 12 people on staff – but then we hooked up with Activision, and they gave us Apocalypse [a third-person shooter featuring the Die Hard star].” All that Activision wanted was a movie tie-in out for Christmas, but Neversoft did such a good job of it that Activision offered the studio some additional work on a new title. “The original concept was that Activision had decided there was a hole in the market for a skateboarding game,” Mick explains, “and so the idea was to do… a skateboarding game.” Neither Neversoft nor Activision had any real “idea of what that would actually be”, and so the team set about trying to figure out exactly what form such a game should take and what would make it fun. “So we built a prototype in the Apocalypse engine with Bruce Willis skating around on a skateboard.”
There wasn’t really any guidance from Activision, and early on in its development obviously Tony Hawk wasn’t tied to the project. “It was just called ‘The Skateboarding Game’,” recalls Mick, “and internally for a long time we referred to it as ‘Skate’ because that was the name we used in the source control system.” Initially, the design was akin to Sega’s Top Skater, but Neversoft noted that people were having more fun tricking around in the half pipes or off ramps in the first level than actually racing to the finish line, inspiring the focus on tricks and combos that the franchise introduced. “We started making more things like that, it just kind of grew organically,” remembers
Mick. Some of the arcade elements remained, such as the time limit and score-attack-style mode, but from there objectives would enter into the mix and Pro Skater was born.
“ACTIVISION DECIDED THERE WAS A HOLE IN THE MARKET FOR A SKATEBOARDING GAME... SO WE BUILT A PROTOTYPE WITH BRUCE WILLIS ON A SKATEBOARD”
But it wasn’t until Tony Hawk got on board (heh…) that Neversoft knew that Activision saw potential in the title. “When they started signing people up, these skaters like Tony Hawk, Bob Burnquist, Eric Koston – famous people – that just showed that Activision was committing to it,” Mick says. The addition of licensed music proved “Activision had its machine behind it,” and this added legal effort and extra spend didn’t just add a sense of confidence to the team. Ultimately, this meant a more relatable and honest experience. Skateboarding at the time wasn’t nearly as pervasive as it is today, but throughout the Nineties its own subculture was only just forming, one that epitomised an attitude but also found roots in music, fashion and language. Activision helped to import a lot of this into the game, but Neversoft focused hard on figuring out exactly what skater culture could mean for the game. “We spent a lot of time at the start of the project watching skate videos,” says Mick, “and this was really the thing that defined the game. There were loads of skate videos back then, we were watching them on
VHS tapes. Every lunchtime we’d watch an hour of skate videos, we’d just immerse ourselves in the skate culture and see what the types of things that people liked to do.” You could argue that for all the efforts in creating thoroughly compelling gameplay to run smoothly, it was actually the way that skater culture was so well-infused into the game that made the title such a success. And it was: releasing first on the Playstation in 1999 and then on N64 and Dreamcast in 2000, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater (Tony Hawk’s Skateboarding in the UK) was met with immediate success.
So began one of the most iconic franchises in gaming, one that not only helped to propel Tony Hawk and skater culture into the limelight, but one that gave Neversoft a great deal of recognition – if not for the game itself, then for the fun, unlockable videos the studio included in the game. For a long time Neversoft would become the skateboarding game studio, especially once the success of THPS was fully realised. “Some of the team were skaters, the artists especially,” recalls Mick of Neversoft’s initial attitude towards skating. “Joel Jewett [Neversoft cofounder] got really into it, he ended up building a half pipe in his backyard, and some of the artists were previously skateboarders.” The decision to make a sequel was made even before the original was released, and knowing that a sequel would be needed did impact the way the studio would grow. “Some of the people that we hired for the next games afterwards,” adds Mick, “if they could skate then that was actually an advantage and it helped them to get hired.”
But when it came to the sequel, Neversoft was actually quite tentative, despite the confidence it had behind the game. “The budget went up and we hired more people, but not a huge amount was different between the first and the second game,” says Mick. “Because we didn’t at the time know just how much of a big thing it was going to be, we actually split the company into two teams: one would work on the Spider-man game and the other would work on Tony Hawk’s 2.” The benefit was that the engine was already in place, so it was easier to create new content and add in new parts to the game within a yearly turnaround. The manual was the first addition, which was intended for the original but was cut due to time restraints, and enabled players to chain long combos together around each map. “It was almost like an easier game to make in a way, because in the first
“WHEN THEY STARTED SIGNING PEOPLE UP, THESE SKATERS LIKE TONY HAWK, BOB BURNQUIST, ERIC KOSTON – FAMOUS PEOPLE – THAT JUST SHOWED THAT ACTIVISION WAS COMMITTING TO IT ”
game we were learning so much new stuff. In the second one, we knew what a really fun skateboarding game was so we could just build on this really solid base and just knocked it out by Thanksgiving.”
THPS2 released on Playstation in September 2000 followed by Windows, Game Boy Color and Dreamcast with further ports arriving for Game Boy Advance, N64 and Mac a year later, and was met with unanimous praise. The series has had an erratic history on handheld devices, but its GBA versions – handled by Vicarious Visions – were widely considered to be a solid recreation of the THPS format despite their isometric viewpoint.
The main Playstation sequel, however, took the foundational gameplay laid down by the original and improved on it in ways that made sense to become the definitive Tony Hawk’s game that every game afterwards would hold a kickflip to. Custom characters, refined level design and a level editor enhanced that core experience, but it was the addition of the aforementioned manuals and wall rides that enhanced the experience – adding to the palette from which the skater could choose to build a combo masterpiece. This was something Mick was especially proud of, having written a unique scripting language just for the trick system. “It was really simple in the first game, but in the second game I had made essentially a little language in assembly language that was specific for the trick system. This would allow you to do things like branch tricks based on various conditions.”
At this point the series was already on track for a hall of fame nomination, but Neversoft didn’t let up. A third game was due and again it was only going to have a year’s turnaround. A simple task considering the improvements that THPS2 managed in the same timeframe, right? “Well the third game was a huge change for us because we did it on the Playstation 2,” explains Mick. “Neversoft switched over entirely to PS2 development at that stage and completely dropped all the Playstation stuff.” Mick admits that this was a little bit of a setback for the team. “Now we suddenly had to learn all of this new stuff. Of course, we had started doing it before the end of Tony Hawk’s 2, so we hired some programmers to work on the engine. We ended up licensing the Renderware Engine to do it. So by the time we had finished Tony Hawk’s 2, we had a little bit of stuff running on the PS2 but it was also very much a learning curve – it was a brand-new system for everyone.”
And like so many developers around the turn of the millennium, Neversoft was growing. In part this was the success of the Tony Hawk series, but it was also partly a necessity to take on the growing demands of 3D game development. “I remember playing [the first] Tony Hawk’s at the office just after I started,” recalls Alan Flores, who started at Neversoft as level designer on the studio’s Spider-man game. “It was super hard for me, it was super frustrating, but I couldn’t stop playing.” Alan explains that the whole company moved over to THPS3, and the move to the next generation of hardware was an opportunity to make something special. “But for me, I had no idea how to make a skating level,” he admits.
“It was really a struggle. The first level I worked on was Suburbia, and I didn’t really understand how to just put lines into it.”
here was a larger scale to
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3’s levels thanks to the PS2’S extra hardware power and the game design had been solidified so there were no questions on that front, but there was one issue that was standing in the team’s way. “One of the things I remember the most with the development then is that we had problems with Renderware,” says Mick. “They had a limitation in their engine where if you use a texture for one model, you couldn’t reuse the same texture for a different model. So if you had a bunch of different cars, they all had to have completely unique textures which obviously limited the amount of models you could have.” Mick points to how he had to spend time fixing bugs in the third-party engine just to get the game made, unable to avoid the “sparse” look of Tony Hawk’s 3. “You can see that change between Tony Hawk’s 3 and Tony Hawk’s 4. The third game looks kind of clean and sparse because there isn’t that much detail,
“In Tony Hawk’s 4 you can see a lot more textures, details, more characters and things like that because we wrote our own, more powerful engine than the Renderware one ”
there aren’t these lavish textures everywhere. In Tony Hawk’s 4 you can see a lot more textures, details, more characters and things like that because we wrote our own, more powerful engine than the Renderware one.”
It was this pair of Playstation 2 Pro Skater games that started to see a change in direction for the series, expanding the levels to incorporate larger environments, a more irreverent approach to the gameplay and a greater emphasis on the open world style of gameplay that was beginning to see prominence on the console. Neversoft was able to keep its hot streak going, with THPS3 releasing in 2001 and THPS4 in 2002 across the range of consoles, computers and GBA. Both were very well-received, but the former is considered the all-time greatest Tony Hawk’s game. The addition of reverts – which added an option to trick out of a half pipe and into a manual for the ultimate combo chain – was the final part to complete the comboing picture. The fourth game was stellar, but everything since brought new features and fun but not necessarily improvements to that core experience.
By the time the pair of Underground games came around (2003 and 2004), it was already high time that the Tony Hawk’s games did something different. Gaming had evolved a lot in that short space of time and the industry was moving away from the short, arcadey style of gameplay and instead into more narrative-based, story-driven designs. “It just opened it up so we could walk around, interact with people and have a bigger and more arching story,” says Alan of the changes that came with THUG. “As developers, sometimes you do something for so long that you want to try something different.”
But it wasn’t just the storyline of the amateur-skater-made-good that arrived with THUG, because now players could – for the first time – dismount their board and explore on foot, shimmy along ledges and generally navigate the open world in a more free-form fashion. “It was fun in some sense because it opens it up a lot,” says Alan. “You could put some stuff in areas that most people wouldn’t be able to access just with the skateboard. But also it gives us the opportunity to sort of break the rules of skate lines.”
hough it was a fairly big change for the franchise and therefore opened it up for extra scrutiny, it was very well-received. THUG released in 2003 with a more irreverent sequel coming in 2004, both on PS2, Xbox and Gamecube. Though the high of THPS3 was never reached again, both were well-received – things were going well for the franchise and for Neversoft as a result. “That was the golden age of Neversoft,” recalls Mick, “because we were seeing the game going to number one in the charts each time we released a game. It was a great feeling. We knew that we were making games that were successful, and we knew that for the first few games we were innovating with the series and making a better game. Not necessarily an entirely different game, but it had changes that were new and interesting. Everyone was pretty happy to be working on it, and a lot of people who came on the team were people who had played the first games and they wanted to work on Tony Hawk games.” And as the game grew in popularity, so too did the opportunities afforded to the team, Mick explains. “We’d take a team of an artist and a level designer out on-location to see what the location looked like, take reference photos and then come back. I think we started to do that with THPS3, but later on we were sending people to Moscow and Hawaii and all kinds of places.”
Though a number of notable developers have dipped their hands in Tony Hawk development with the various ports of the franchise – Treyarch, Vicarious Visions, Edge Of Reality, Beenox and more have all been tied to the ports – Neversoft wasn’t quite ready to relinquish ownership of the game just yet. “What happened after Underground was done, we were going to split the company up and half of the company was going to work on Gun,” explains Alan. “I started working on that. We loved the franchise but there was some brand fatigue, and we thought we would let the series rest for a year. But Activision, they like to put out yearly sequels, so they said they were going to give it to another developer. So then me and a couple of other guys went to Joel [Jewett] and said, ‘Forget that man, we can’t give Tony Hawk away, that’s our game, we wanna do it.’ We couldn’t stand the idea – especially that Tony
It just opened it up so we could walk around, interact with people and have a bigger and more arching story
Hawk had been in Neversoft for so long.” The result was American Wasteland, and despite the enthusiasm given to it by the team, Alan admits it was a gruelling task. “We had spent a couple of months on Gun, we still had the yearly cycle, Underground was a big hit. We needed to figure out how to make a game in a little bit less time that could still hold up to THUG.” The only way to handle this was with a looser title, one that was more akin to traditional Tony Hawk’s gameplay but with crazier challenges and more freedom. Open world streaming technology was the big feature, though an interim solution (“You know, we’re a yearly franchise,” points out Alan) of long tunnels connecting the different areas was necessary. The short turnaround had an effect, of course, but it was still fairly well-received. But perhaps more importantly, it solidified the franchise’s switch to more over-the-top and frivolous objectives, too, which practically every game afterwards followed.
American Wasteland released in 2005 for PS2, Gamecube, Xbox and Xbox 360, while Neversoft would still work on follow ups with Project 8 and Proving Ground for Xbox 360 and PS3 in 2006 and 2007 respectively. Though a Wii release attempted to do something different with motion control in Downhill Jam, it wasn’t especially well-thought-out, and the general lack of freshness and innovation in the series ultimately meant its appeal began to dwindle. Sales were still stable, but like so many old-school franchises transitioning to a more serious era of gaming with the PS3 and Xbox 360, it was a challenge to pull in the annual audience in the face of so many drastic changes to gamer habits and interests. Alan admits that the team “were always worried about figuring out what it is the fans wanted for the next game” while still creating a game the studio could be happy with. “There’s a lot of people that will stand up and say they love your game, but there are a lot more people who will come up and say, ‘You guys are idiots, this is horrible.’ There’s always a ton of pressure.” Proving Ground was particularly notable for such reasons. It arrived only a month after EA had decided it would grind into the genre with Skate, which introduced tricking with the analogue stick and was seen as innovative in ways that the Tony Hawk’s games hadn’t been for years. This made Proving Ground’s decision to return to an arcade style seem all the more ancient.
Things needed to change, but with Neversoft shifting its focus to Guitar Hero and about ready to let go of skateboarding, Activision needed to look for another developer to take on the mantle of
Tony Hawk game development. But
Neversoft’s impact had inadvertently had an effect here, too, with the next non-mobile game in the series being Tony Hawk: Ride, releasing in 2009 on PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii. Much like the addictively clicky plastic peripherals of Neversoft’s Guitar Hero, Activision and its enlisted developer Robomodo had decided that the best way to innovate on a tried-and-true genre was to add its own misguided novelty controller: thus Ride was born, which had players standing atop a ‘skateboard’ and having to physically hop for ollies or reach to the board for grab tricks. Activision had once termed it a necessary “breakthrough” for the series when pitching it to investors, but for gamers the release oozed cynicism from the start – and it obviously bombed. The money spent on such an expensive investment wasn’t to be wasted, however, and so Tony Hawk: Shred released a year later, adding in snowboarding of all things to the gimmicky controller. In its first week Shred sold an embarrassing 3,000 copies in North America, and caused Activision to put the franchise on hiatus.
his effectively meant no ‘new’ release in the franchise besides a botched downloadable-only Pro Skater HD in 2012 that disappointed series fans and baffled newcomers and a pair of smartphone releases with Shred Session (2014) and Skate Jam (2018) – both of which, as you might expect, didn’t amount to much. Robomodo did have one final shot in 2015, but the developer was not given a fair chance to do the legendary franchise justice. Though it was never officially confirmed, Activision’s licensing agreement with Tony Hawk was due to end in 2015 and so Robomodo had only a few months to produce the first Pro Skater successor for 13 years. The title retained the arcadey gameplay of its THPS stablemates, but it was nothing short of a disaster with bugged gameplay, graphics on Xbox One and PS4 that were worse than the PS2 equivalents and none of the quality the brand had once epitomised. Unsurprisingly, Robomodo closed shortly after its release.
Luckily, these latter years can be something of a lesson for Activision and Vicarious Visions, which once again finds itself working on Pro Skater. This time as the lead developer of the series, VV is leveraging its respectable experience bringing a beloved Playstation classic into the modern era with the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 Remaster. “Skating epic lines, dope music, and trying to one up your friends is what hooked me,” says Barry Morales, senior producer at Vicarious Visions.
“As a fan of the original games, I believe these games remain popular because they had the whole package,” he adds, highlighting how the team now has the chance to introduce “a whole new generation” to that addictive gameplay.
“Going from a teenager playing the originals to a developer working on the remaster, it’s a pretty special experience – it’s been an honour for me.” And who knows, if it manages to varial heelflip the franchise back into relevance, maybe we’ll even see a brand-new Birdman release in the future. It worked for Crash Bandicoot, after all...
Going from a teenager playing the originals to a developer working on the remaster, it’s a pretty special experience – it’s been an honour for me