Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater was my introduction to sports gaming. Growing up I played Sega Genesis games and Dreamcast games (Sonic, Streets of Rage, etc.). So naturally I wasn’t interested in sports games. To me they seemed stale and repetitive — kick ball, throw ball, try not to lose. What’s the fun in that? Don’t get me wrong, I think I just enjoyed how unpredictable and creative Sega games let you be.
That is until I popped in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater one day. It was 1999, and I was hanging out at my friend Mike’s house (he had a PS One; I was diehard Dreamcast guy). He turned on this new skateboarding game called “Tony Hawk” and told me, “You’ve got to cheque this out.” Now if you know gamers, that’s literally what every single one of them says when they’re trying to show you a new game.
Typically I would just chuckle, let them show you for a couple minutes until they tired of demonstrating, and then we would jump back to playing some Crazy Taxi or Power Stone on my Dreamcast.
This time was different though. Something about the energy coming from Mike’s television was contagious. The music kicked on first, and I thought it sounded dope — never heard that punk-rock song before. It wasn’t your basic “game rock” like most other videogames used. Next thing I see, Hawk is hitting avert in what I would soon discover was called the Warehouse. 30 seconds in he’s pulling off this insane combo that looked so outrageous, and yet I somehow felt like I could do it too. Mike swaps me for the controller after his two-minute ride, and I figured I’d give him a few minutes then hop back on my controller to play Dreamcast games with Mike.
Boy was I wrong.
Hang on… There I was grinding down a rail I didn’t even know existed, smoothly connecting tricks together that made zero sense logically, but felt incredible to execute. It reminded me of the simplicity Sega games had — you could pick up any Sega game and immediately know how to play it, but there was so much depth to the games that would take you years to truly master.
Granted I wasn’t going to learn this game in one sitting, but what stuck with me was how rewarding the scoring felt. Other sports games were all about winning or losing. Kick more field goals than the other team. Score more touchdowns. But with THPS, it was about your expression of movement. Each trick flowed so effortlessly into the next, your combos could go on for minutes at a time. Your multiplier would increase the longer you chained tricks together, incentivizing you to try harder tricks in order to achieve the highest score possible. It was… liberating is the word that comes to mind. Think about it like this: what if Street Fighter rewarded you for stringing your own custom combos instead of teaching you preset combinations? Now you’re cooking with gas!
I went out and bought my own copy a week later. Mind you I was in college at this point and never had any money, but THIS GAME HAD BROKEN ME. It wasn’t just about chaining together tricks, there was also this risk versus reward gameplay added on top of that. Land a simple trick and you’ll get points, sure, but keep pumping those tricks in the hardest-to-reach places possible and you’ll be rewarded with scores you never thought possible. But mess up? Your combo hits zero and you have to start over. You’ll find yourself skating far past your comfortable abilities just to see if you can land that next trick.
This was made even better by how the levels were designed. Each stage in the game was purpose-built for creativity and trying new things. Skate parks in real life are fairly restrictive when it comes to what you can do. There’s only so much you can do on a halfpipe or even a pool. But these levels were gigantic playgrounds of stuff you could grind on. I spent hours just in the School level, discovering new ways to link sections of the school through manuals and wall-grabs. My favorite trick I discovered? Connecting the gymnasium to the outside of the school through some crazy grind-gap-jump-manual combination that felt so secret and unique.
This reminded me of how Sega games would always have that feeling of discovering something new. Whether it was finding a new path through Green Hill Zone or uncovering a hidden ability in Sonic’s move set, Sega games were the best at making you feel special as you played through their games. Skate games have never felt that way to me until now. And every time I booted up THPS I was instantly rewarded with new combinations to attempt. There was always something new to discover — some hidden song you could grind to or some new pathway that connected two sections of a stage you didn’t know you could connect.
Needless to say, secret tape locations became my favorite— spotting that glowing VHS box sitting high above you, thinking to yourself “How the hell am I supposed to get there?” and then spending the next hour just trying to figure out what moves you need to grind in order to clip that tape.
Oh, and did I mention the soundtrack to this game? HOLY FREAKING SHIT. I thought I was cool with my music. Sure I listened to some punk music here and there. Listened to popular alternative radio stations, bought a few CDs that weren’t bad, etc. But HOLY MOLY this game was something else. I knew every word to “Superman” by Goldfinger. Bands like Dead Kennedys, Rage Against The Machine, and Suicidal Tendencies were no longer just names to me — they were part of my everyday soundtrack.
Amazingly, the game never felt cheapened by the soundtrack. Rather the songs were strategically implemented to create moments where everything would just sync up. Building up a huge combo, feeling that tension grow as your multiplier increases, then nailing that last trick as the song’s chorus hits? I’ve never experienced another video game that understands how to make you feel like a badass quite like THPS.
Another component that made the game feel so authentic was just how much love and care was put into every aspect of it. This wasn’t issued approved by some group of corporate yes men. You could tell that the people making this game actually enjoyed skating as much as I did. Each professional skater wasn’t just there for name value — they all had unique statistics, special tricks, and skating styles that would accurately represent their real-life persona. I knew nothing about Rodney Mullen going into THPS2, but by the time I was done with the game I was searching the internet for REAL skate videos. Mullen is bonkers I learned. And you know what? Even more bonkers in real life.
And skateboarding was BOOMING because of this game. Everyone was talking about skateboarding. Ask any SKB reader, and you’re sure to find someone who picked up a skateboard for the first time because of THPS. Local skate shops were flourishing off of people buying beginner skateboards. Things like the X-Games went from being this underground “only skaters watch this” to “oh sweet! The X-Games are on!” Skateboarding was for everyone, and THPS opened the door for so many people to understand our culture.
I was definitely one of those people who bought a skateboard after playing THPS. Oh man, I was way too old to start skating at 20 years old — but damn if I didn’t at least try. Pulled off countless 900s in my apartment’s parking lot I have you. Failed. But similar to the rest of arcade-skating community, I still have the utmost respect for those who can actually do these things in real life.
As the series progressed they found ways to expand on the concepts introduced in the first game. THPS2 introduced manuals — allowing you to connect street tricks tovert tricks and keep your combo going! As if that wasn’t enough, they went & added revers into THPS3. Reverts allowed you to reverse out of avert trick and back into street, keeping your combo alive. These small adjustments to the skating formula opened up so many possibilities for creative combos.
By the time you reach THPS3 and THPS4 they absolutely nailed the balance of easy to learn, hard to master. The stage designers really took to heart the idea of challenging you to find new ways to grind every element of their stages. You could even design your own custom skate parks in the create-a-park mode. More time was probably spent in THPS’s level editor than actually playing the games included stages.
What’s incredible is they proved you didn’t need realism to sell authenticity. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater taught me more about what it’s like to be a skateboarder than any Documentary every could. The freedom you felt playing these games was so empowering. It taught me how to look at the world around me as if it were one big skateboard park.
Physically you couldn’t replicate what we could do in these games, but the spirit in which these games were created captured what it’s like to be a skateboarder. Other sports needed to play realistic to be authentic, but THPS showed me that wasn’t the case. You didn’t need to match perfectly how a sport works in real life to successfully sell what it’s like to participate in that sport.
Especially if the alternative is allowing me to pull a 900 off of two stairs. 😏
Every sports game since tried to replicate the magic we found in those simple grind combos. SSX took snowboarding in the same arcade direction. Racing games began to implement trick systems and creative scoring. Sports games would finally begin to embrace the ideas that you didn’t need to win or lose to have fun with sports games.
Sure, games like the Skate series came along and tried to base their skating games around a simulation-style format. While I loved the direction they were going, it always felt like they were reacting to Tony Hawk. The use of an analog stick to control your trucks was genius, no doubt helped by the fact that skating actually felt like skateboarding. But there was something about THPS that kept me coming back year after year.
As more and more installments were released, they began to wander from what made them so great. Storylines? Please — nobody asked for that ( Underground). Novelty skateboard controllers?! Save yourself and everyone else some trouble and don’t bother ( Ride, Shred). We all knew it was happening when THPS5 came out and literally felt like they outsourced the development to China.
Thank god they decided to remake the first two entries. Released Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 in 2020, and if you haven’t played that game yet — what are you waiting for? It mastered the art of what made the originals so great. I popped it in for the first time and felt like my muscle memory from my college years kicked back in. I somehow remembered combos I haven’t done since I was 21 years old!
My children both picked it up and fell down the same rabbit hole I did as a kid. They both got hooked on theBandCamper as hard as I was nearly 20 years ago. Proof that great game design is timeless.
David runs a pub in Bristol and has transformed his back room into a functional shrine to arcade cabinets and early home systems. By night he writes about arcade culture, MAME emulation ethics, and why certain games simply feel different on original hardware versus emulation. He brings a perspective that matters: he owns these machines, maintains them, and plays them regularly, rather than just holding memories of them. His technical knowledge of arcade hardware is matched only by his ability to explain why authenticity genuinely matters to the experience.
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