Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater

Looking back at one of the most important licensed sports titles and the series it helped to spawn.

Just how much did Neversoft’s take on the tricks and friendly competition of skateboarding go on to influence the concept of the wider sandbox playground experience in gaming? It’s hard to quantify, but we’re going to say quite a lot. It may have been driven by specific cultural and sporting traditions to create the game that it did with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, but through it and the games that would follow, it helped to develop a benchmark for what it means to create a fun, anarchic and free-form space to just play in an openworld game.

And all of this because it decided to stick skate parks at the end of race courses in an early test of a skateboarding game, only to realise that – rather than just being a place to kill time until the other racers had finished – this was where most players wanted to spend their time. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Neversoft’s journey to making the most iconic and cherished of action sports titles and series in gaming was an odd one, and it’s interesting to retell it, if only for context.

Neversoft was a relative unknown before being signed up by Activision to work on a Bruce Willis-led shooter called Apocalypse and a skateboarding prototype. It had only released one game after a series of other projects were cancelled or fell away for various reasons, but in the race for teams who could adapt to the new 3D era in the latenineties, Neversoft was clearly capable of handling itself.

Since Apocalypse’s 3D engine seemed to work pretty well, it was utilised for the production of this skateboarding project, still yet to have a name or any licensing attached to it. Early versions were heavily inspired by Top Skater from Sega and Street Sk8er from EA, with levels that were constructed as downhill races, but also encouraged tricks along the way. As we mentioned before, Neversoft smartly designed small skate parks at the bottom of the tracks with the intention

that players could kill time there while they waited for others to finish the course. In testing, however, this proved to be where the most time was spent by players, so the team pivoted towards making it the focus of the experience, embracing the feedback it was getting from its potential fans.

This was a massive breakthrough for a number of reasons, one of the more important being that skating around a park or in abandoned spaces much more closely replicated the way most people actually experienced skateboarding in the real world, whether on the boards themselves or watching their friends. They weren’t taking part in races and competitions, they were out in the streets, creating their own fun, and Neversoft was embracing that aspect of the culture.

Embracing the culture is really the very core of what would ultimately make this game Tony Hawk’s Pro

Skating and turn it into a series to be reckoned with. Securing the name and branding of the sport’s most prominent practitioner, of course, was also a major step in that journey – having Hawk himself regularly playtest new versions of the game through development helped maintain some authenticity.

The aspect of the culture that has probably been most heavily lauded over the years was the soundtrack. Its mix of punk, rock and hip-hop was not only a perfect reflection of the music that young skaters were blasting out of their boomboxes at parks and empty pools around North America, it was also one of the first great examples of a licensed soundtrack in the CD gaming era. It marked Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater as not just a skateboarding simulation, but a fuller skateboarding experience that celebrated not just the skill and technique of the sport, but the fandom and lifestyle as well. And it’s a soundtrack that, ahead of series such as

Guitar Hero and Rock Band, was cited by the bands involved as a massive boost to their tour turnout and really helped album sales.

Ultimately, however, we have to come back to the pure construction of the game and its mini-sandbox feel. The campaign mode of Pro Skater had you working under a time limit to collect tapes through completing challenges before the clock runs down. It invited exploration, but more importantly forced replays as you learnt the layout and worked out a route that allowed you to hit all of the key points. Collecting everything and unlocking tapes was essential to unlocking the next stage, but it was also fun in and of itself, which is something we’ve seen repeated on a much wider scale in games like Crackdown or more recently

Spider-Man, in which small collectibles unlock upgrades and enhancements.

In the years that have since passed, the Tony Hawk’s series has sadly declined, but it enjoyed fantastic success immediately following Pro

Skater – it embraced its more extreme and bizarre side with Underground, and attempted to break into motion controls with Ride, which we would suggest lead to the series unfortunately losing its way. But Pro Skater set the bar for action sports experiences and limited open-world level design.

Following on from Pro Skater, we would see Jet Set Radio build up even bigger and crazier antics on roller- skates, while EA would eventually return to skateboarding with something closer to a sim experience with Skate.

Also, of course, 3D open-world design would embrace the timed challenge and collectibles model that Neversoft’s game made clear was a wildly successful way to structure an experience, expanding the structure out over bigger worlds with more complex systems and traveserval mechanics. And, critically, it helped get a lot of people into skateboarding, into the culture around skateboarding and into the music around the scene.