Latest news with #ProSkater
Washington Post
20 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Tony Hawk is still making you see the world like a skater
After becoming the world's most recognizable athlete for his chosen sport, Anthony Frank 'Tony' Hawk is now a 57-year-old grandfather. It's a life that's vastly exceeded any expectations he ever had. Named at birth like a superhero, Tony Hawk became the face of skateboarding in no small part due to Activision's blockbuster 'Tony Hawk's Pro Skater' series, which just released remakes of its third and fourth games, developed by Iron Galaxy. Hawk's amiable presence is felt across his fan interactions and interviews, proving it's still possible in 2025 to hold all that clout and still be down to earth. Hawk tells The Post in an interview that it's because nothing, including skateboarding becoming a respected, international sport, was ever expected. 'There's just no way I would've dreamt any of this,' Hawk says. 'You couldn't be rich or famous as a skateboarder when I first started. No one had been.' It's been a long road to respectability for the once-maligned sport, invented in the 1940s and '50s by bored Southern California surfers looking for more reasons to be on a board. Sidelined and dismissed for decades as idle activity for loitering teens and misfits, skateboarding has elevated to the Olympic Games. Hawk and some of his peer skating legends attribute much of that rise in acceptance to the 1999 game developed by the now-defunct Neversoft Entertainment, 'Tony Hawk's Pro Skater.' 'Tony is the revolution, he took us to a whole other level,' said Kareem Campbell, the Harlem-born 51-year-old often called the godfather of smooth street style and inventor of the 'Ghetto Bird' trick. 'The game helped pro skating be in the Olympics right now. He became a household name. Every skater on the game became a household name. It captures all the different elements of skateboarding.' The game became a top seller on Sony PlayStation in 1999, and its sequel next year was even bigger. It revolutionized the extreme sports genre in video games by wearing its video game inspirations on its sleeve. Scott Pease, former Neversoft studio development director, said the ragtag team of developers looked to the early pioneers of 3D video games to inspire their own groundbreaking work. 'The influences are definitely '[Super] Mario 64,' and even to a certain extent, 'Diddy Kong Racing,'' Pease said, giggling to himself. 'If you look at the structure of 'Tony Hawk 1' with the secret tapes and the goals, we kinda lifted a lot of that from 'Diddy Kong Racing,'' whose collectible balloons let players unlock more of the game. The game also mimicked racing games, propelling skaters forward automatically. Level designs used real-life skate spots like schools and abandoned warehouses, all littered with rails and ledges for grinding and ramps for vertical tricks. 'A lot of that comes from our lead programmer and technical director Mick West and him trying to understand how people interacted with their controller,' Pease said. Game designers were still figuring out how to make 3D gameplay feel natural. 'He understood innately that the camera and your responsiveness were completely connected, and how your view is completely determined by that 3D camera. Mick invented the camera movement where you jump off the vert ramp and the camera would swing around and look down to see where you were going to land. Without that, there's no game.' As a child of the coin-munching arcades of the 1980s, Hawk grew up on video games. He had played every skateboarding game ever made, but for years he was looking for the perfect formula. Hawk said he was shopping around various game publishers pitching a skating game, and Activision caught wind and invited him to Neversoft. In 1998, Neversoft made a game starring Bruce Willis called 'Apocalypse.' It didn't sell well, but the team used the same 3D technology to power a prototype of their hypothetical skating game. Sans a pro skater, they used Willis. 'The first build I ever saw of the game was seeing Bruce Willis on a skateboard,' Hawk said. 'I was able to control him, do kick-flips and do grabs and spins, and I thought, 'This is the coolest thing I've ever been able to play.'' 'Tony Hawk's Pro Skater' became the rare video game experience that can alter one's perception of the world. Like 'Tetris' induced its players to perceive the world built with blocks of four tiles, 'THPS' made its players think like a skater, seeing 'lines' of opportunity across the framework of civilization. 'Especially in the first few years, people who never skated suddenly understood skate culture, skate language, and they would see landscapes as skateable places in the real world,' Hawk said. 'That's when I saw a big shift.' It was normalizing skating culture right at the turn of the millennium, as the video games industry expanded to new audiences with the introduction of PlayStation and Microsoft Xbox. Brazil-born Bob Burnquist, winner of 30 medals at the X Games, was in the first class of pro skaters of the series, handpicked by Hawk. Now 48, Burnquist grew up in Rio de Janeiro, far away from the skating hotbed of Southern California. He admired Hawk from afar as a teen. 'I got a glimpse of Tony for the first time on video. Friends would travel to the U.S. and come home with a VHS tape, and that's how we got what was happening. Right when I started, Tony in 1989 went down to Brazil. My dad couldn't take me, but it just put a mark on Brazil.' Burnquist saw the spread of anti-skateboarding legislation across various jurisdictions, including Brazil. It was important for him to see that it was growing in popularity despite these bans. The game was a piercing bullet through the consciousness of a new generation, millennials who grew into midlife today. 'After all these years, you have the city of Rio you can choose [in the game] with all these different characters, and seeing Brazil there? It's an accomplishment for Brazilian skateboarding,' Burnquist said. 'To be included as a Brazilian, it showed we are a part of the culture.' Skating culture was not immune to the changes brought upon by the internet. People of Hawk's generation discovered new tricks and athletes through the VHS tapes and magazines like Thrasher. Hawk said social media has changed the dynamics of discovery. 'When we first started this game, one of the only ways to be known as a skater was to compete, and if you weren't competing, you'd better be producing a lot of video, and you hoped to be featured in a skate video,' Hawk said. 'Nowadays you can be your own brand, producing content daily and sharing it whenever. Now the field is wider and more open, but you have to keep producing, have to keep getting better at it. You can't just rest on your accolades, that's the one thing that's been the same throughout the years.' Hawk takes credit for igniting the current remakes. He approached Activision to use the intellectual property for a concert series, and suggested the series be revived somehow for its 20th anniversary. For the first two games, Activision tapped an internal studio that eventually got absorbed into its sizable operation to create the titanic 'Call of Duty' series. For the remake 'Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4,' released July 11, Iron Galaxy was selected. Despite carrying the title of games from the early 2000s, the studio considers the latest release a new project, said game director Kurt Tillmanns. This includes new levels made just for this release. 'We were able to go in and make brand new levels and unlock our creativity, do some wacky things like pinball and make this skater's paradise of a shut-down water park,' Tillmanns said. The game also largely overhauls its soundtrack. Hawk takes credit for that decision, in the spirit of how the original game introduced players to new bands and music genres. (The 'Tony Hawk' and 'Grand Theft Auto' games are often credited with expanding the use of licensed popular music in the medium.) Besides, listening to old songs can be like putting too fine a mark on the past. The most iconic song from the games is Goldfinger's 'Superman,' with a chorus that yells 'Growing older all the time.' Hawk is now grandfather to Ronin Walker Cobain Hawk, as his son Riley (now featured in the updated games) married rock legend Kurt Cobain's daughter, Frances Bean. The birth announcement resulted in an explosion of memes suggesting the coolest human being might've been born. 'Being a grandparent is exactly all the fun that grandparents gush over, and the reason they get excited when they know their grandchild's coming. That's how my wife and I feel exactly,' Hawk said. 'The fact that Ronin has this legacy behind him, I don't want him to feel like he has to live up to anything in that respect. I just want him to find what he really enjoys, to follow his passion. I just want him to have fun, and I don't want him to feel like an outsider or that people are looking at him in a different way.' Hawk said the family has a group text chat of nothing but photos of the still-infant Ronin, and he had just received them and was looking at them before the interview. But is grandpa Hawk feeling older all the time? 'Oh my body feels it every time I wake up. I definitely have my go-to skill set, but it's a lot more work than it used to be, and a lot more recovery and progress.' For Tony Hawk's pro and personal adventures, it's been a life well lived. 'I'm living the dream, the idea that I still get to participate, and then I get to witness skating come to this level, and I can help guide or foster up-and-coming skaters,' Hawk said. 'It's between that and helping to develop public skate parks, that's the most important and most gratifying work I can do.'
USA Today
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Tony Hawk talks THPS 3 + 4 remake, skateboarding at the Olympics
Tony Hawk had an idea: what if he could bring skateboarding to video games? Hawk had grown up a fan of gaming, he told USA TODAY Sports in a one-on-one interview. He grew up as they rose to prominence with games like "Pong," "Pac-Man" and "Donkey Kong." His first home console was an Intellivision, originally manufactured by Mattel and released in 1979. As he got older, Hawk bought other consoles – he named the Commodore 64, Super NES and PlayStation – and continued playing video games. So by the time the late '90s rolled around and video games were becoming more mainstream, Hawk was ready to capitalize on the moment to make a skateboarding game. But for a while, his idea wasn't going anywhere. "I had been in talks with a few different developers and console manufacturers about doing a possible game, but none of them were agreed upon. None of them were actually green lit," Hawk said. "In fact, it was it was kind of a uphill battle convincing anyone. "I had given up, to be honest, probably sometime in 1997." The birth of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater That's around the time video game publisher Activision called Hawk, saying that they had heard the X Games gold medalist was trying to make a game. When Hawk told them that he had been unable to get anything going, Activision told him they had been working on a game and invited him to see it. "And so I went to Activision," Hawk said. "I saw a very early build of what became THPS (Tony Hawk's Pro Skater) and immediately, I knew this was the game. I could tell instinctively that this would be the most fun, that this would be the best one to be involved with, and with my connections and resources and experience, we could make this something truly authentic." So, on Sept. 29, 1999, the world got its first taste of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, the first of five games in the series and what has gone on to become 21 games in the Tony Hawk's skateboarding video game franchise. The first game released to rave reviews from critics and players alike, winning Game Informer magazine's 1999 Game of the Year award. The legacy of the first game and its three sequels – released in each of the next three years – lives on. Many writers and analysts have credited THPS with pushing skateboarding into the global mainstream and introducing more young people to skateboarding. The soundtrack from the games – full of punk rock and ska punk music – is also celebrated for its influence in spreading those music genres. Hawk is well aware of the lasting impact the games have had on its audience, and he referenced memes that he continues to see on social media platforms. He said, "A lot of them always use our game to explain some of the best times in their lives. And that's something I don't take for granted. I'm very proud of it, and when I get recognized in public, (the THPS games are) usually the first thing people want to talk about." Remastering a classic Flash forward to 2019, 20 years after the release of the original "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater." Hawk wanted to put on a 20th anniversary concert to raise money for his foundation, The Skatepark Project, then known as the Tony Hawk Foundation. Hawk reached out to Activision for permission to use the THPS IP for the event. Bobby Kotick, then-CEO of the publisher, both consented to the use of the IP and had Activision sponsor the fundraiser. That, Hawk says, was the catalyst for the idea to remake the THPS series, upgrading the visuals and technology behind the games to make them suitable for new hardware and potentially bring in a new audience. Kotick told Hawk at the time that he had an idea of which video game development studios would be up to the task of remaking the, at this point, classic games and doing right by their fans. Within a year, Kotick Activision had indeed found the studio – Vicarious Visions, now known as Blizzard Albany – and greenlit the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2 remake game. Hawk said when he played the remade versions of the first two iterations of the video game series named after him, he felt similarly to how he did the first time he played the original Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. "I think (I had) even a deeper appreciation for it because it it was utilizing the newest technology and so it looked much more real, it felt much more real," Hawk said. On Sept. 4, 2020, nearly 20 years to the day of the release of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2 debuted. It was the first new Tony Hawk's skateboarding game for consoles since 2015's Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5. The game sold one million copies in the first two weeks after release. Its reviews were similarly positive to the original iterations of the series, receiving a 90 score (out of 100) for the PlayStation 5 version on review aggregator site Metacritic. Remaking more sequels Less than five years later – and earlier this month – Activision released the follow-up fans have been waiting for: Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4. Like its predecessor, the game combines remakes of two games in the original, four-game THPS series – this time, the latter two games – and received generally favorable reviews from critics, per Metacritic. The newest game includes new music, new levels and new skaters in addition to bringing back old soundtrack hits, original levels in their upgraded format and many of the original skaters as well. Hawk said he had a good amount of say in the songs that were in the updated soundtrack, an important thing to get right given how much of a staple music was in the original games. He said almost every song suggestion he made was included in the new soundtrack. "Including my stepson's band T.C.M.F. with the song 'Result,'" Hawk said. "It totally fits. And if you didn't know I was related to him, you would think, 'Oh yeah, that song belongs there.'" If he had to pick favorites from the new soundtrack, Hawks says they'd be "Damaged Goods" by Gang of Four and "Gift Horse" by Idles. For the new levels, Hawk said he didn't have as much of a say, but he has a feeling he knows where at least one of the ideas came from. One of the new levels, "Water Park," draws inspiration from a 2019 video from Thrasher Magazine showing Hawk and other skaters doing tricks around a drained water park. "A few years ago, I did skate a water park and that was well documented, and then suddenly that was an idea for the game," Hawk said. "I'm not saying that that's exactly the chronology, but I think it had a lot to do with it." Another level addition, "Pinball," allows the player to skate through a giant pinball machine that a larger-than-life-sized version of Hawk is playing. When it came to the skaters, Hawk loved being able to include many of the same original skaters from the original games. Said Hawk: "The idea that we had all the same cast of characters – in that 1 + 2 remaster and now in 3 + 4 – and they all still skate! You know what I mean? Like that's an amazing legacy, and we can make them age appropriate. "Someone asked me recently like, 'Is your character your age?' I'm like, 'He is, because I'm still skating!'" There are also plenty of new additions to the roster of skaters in the new game, including two-time street gold medalist Yuto Horigome, two-time street medalist Rayssa Leal and even a few fictional characters: Michelangelo of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the Doom Slayer from the Doom video game series are both playable characters. Hawk says he'll usually play as himself in the games but occasionally branches out to use other skaters to explore their unique tricks. One other skater, in particular, often gets some extra play above the others. "I would say if I'm not playing my character, then I'm playing my son Riley," he said. Tony Hawk on skateboarding at the Olympics Outside of helping in the development of remaking the video games he lent his name to, Hawk has been something of a global ambassador to the sport of skateboarding. He was an early part of the push to get it included in the Olympics in the first place. "I was advocating for it from the get-go when I knew that it was even in the realm of possibility and in conversations with the IOC (International Olympic Committee)," he said. "I attended plenty of meetings. I actually flew to Lausanne (the IOC's home in Switzerland) at one point. I went to the youth games. I was trying everything I could to raise the profile and to show that it would be a great addition. "And then when it finally did get added as as a sport and as a medal category, that's when I backed out honestly. Once I knew it was in, I didn't want to be part of the machine. I just wanted to help it guide it there in the in the early days." The International Olympic Committee (IOC) first voted to include skateboarding in the Summer Olympic Games in the 2020 iteration in Tokyo. Skateboarding was also an event in the 2024 Paris Games and is set to take place once again in 2028 in Los Angeles. In each of the first two editions of Olympic skateboarding, Hawk was there each time not only as a witness, but as a participant. "It's the coolest. It's like the best of all worlds, because I get to go see it, I get to participate," he said. "Like I got to ride the course both in Tokyo and Paris before the skaters. "I get to to watch from the sidelines and I don't have to judge. It's been amazing to see and to see the the amount of interest and growth and hype that it has received." Hawk noted that a large part of that interest and growth has been most noticeable with young women and girl skaters in recent years. He told an anecdote about his own vertical ramp contest – Tony Hawk's Vert Alert – struggling to get girls to sign up to fill up their side of a bracket just for the first iteration of the event four years ago. "It was kind of like, 'Any girl that even could skate ramps at all, you're in,'" Hawk said. "And now the field is huge and we have to hold qualifying way beforehand. "And I mean just in the case of like someone like Arisa Trew, she she did a 900 (Tony Hawk's signature trick consisting of two full, 360-degree rotations with an additional 180) last year. It's amazing. It's amazing that how just in that five years, how exponentially it's grown." In addition to helping bridge the gender divide in skating, Hawk said the Olympics have also been a massive part in bringing the sport to a more global audience. He pointed to countries like China and Uganda, places where skating was not as popular or didn't even really exist in decades past. "There was never skating in China before the Olympics, and now they have training facilities and actual skaters and places where kids can go and learn," Hawk said. "And that's huge." Uganda now has a "thriving skating scene" as well, says Hawk. And even though the country didn't participate in the skating event for the Olympics, there's still more attention on skateboarding there because of the recent iterations of Summer Games. If there's one thing Hawk would change about the Olympic skateboarding events, it's that he wishes they included a vert event: competitions with halfpipes and large, vertical ramps. Hawk specialized in those events during his career – a vert competition at the fifth X Games is where he pulled off the first-ever 900 in 1999. Instead, the only two skateboarding events at the quadrennial Games are "street" and "park" skating, which feature small courses with obstacles for the skaters to use for various tricks. Hawk called himself the "gnat in their (the IOC's) ear" while trying to push for a vert event in the Olympics. Though he understood the reasoning it wasn't included in the original, 2020 Tokyo Games – a lack of vertical ramps worldwide would have made holding qualifying events a challenge – he's still hoping – and pushing – for its inclusion in a future iteration. Hawk said he hasn't been contacted (yet) about helping set up any of the events for the 2028 Games, which will take place in Los Angeles, not far from Hawk's hometown of San Diego. But he has already offered help with setting up a vert event. "I have offered up my ramp and my presence. If they want to put vert in in any context, here's a free vert ramp," he said. "Put it wherever you want and I'll be there."
Forbes
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
‘Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4' Review: Get On Board
'Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4 takes a few minor missteps, but it's still among the most faithful ... More remakes ever made. It's been a five-year wait for the inevitable follow-up to the superb Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2, and it's been worth it: Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4 has replicated the PS2 era of the franchise with aplomb, even with an all-new dev team at the helm. The half-decade between releases also provides a fantastic way for original fans of the Tony Hawk series to measure their own physical and cognitive decline. The Foundry demo, released last month, was one of the most punishing things I've played in a while; I thought I'd rack up seven-digit scores on my second or third go, but instead smashed my face in repeatedly. Surely, new developer Iron Galaxy has broken something? Nope, quite the opposite — I'm the thing that's crumbling. Personal crises aside, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4 doesn't just do the original games justice — it adds some truly special touches that go beyond a careful and respectful rebuild. In keeping with the source material, it's not perfect, but it's bloody good fun. Superstar newcomers Three new levels come to THPS 3+4: Waterpark, as announced earlier this year, which is frankly the star of the show and is among the best parks in the series, period; Movie Studio, a brilliant little excursion that favors grinding; and Pinball, the oddball unlockable level at the end that's reminiscent of the PS1 version of THPS3's Little Big World, and is probably better to look at than to play. FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder A couple of levels from the originals have been axed, namely Carnival — a real shame — and Chicago, which was an imported stage from Mat Hoffman's Pro BMX 2. Still, the glow-up given to other parks and areas is insane. The work done on 3's Airport, my favorite stage of all, is nothing short of incredible. Past also-rans feel much more enjoyable now, too, like Kona, Skater's Island, and London. Still, other creative decisions seem strange, most notably with Zoo, easily one of my favorite levels from the original. It's now abandoned and without animals, and it's hard to understand why; it's not like you could 50-50 a giraffe's neck in the original, and the occasional dodgy challenge (specifically, 'Skitch the Elephant') could be replaced. That doesn't stop it from being a lot of fun to play, though, as the core of the park is still there. The Pinball level is a new height of insanity. Collectathon On top of each zone's ten goals, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4 carries over its predecessor's other collectables like cash, stat points, and the developer logo. These are a lot more fiendish to get this time around — specifically the effing money on a plane in Suburbia. Still, you battle on, stacking stats into air, speed, and hangtime. A few other things have been shaken up for this outing, so you can't rely on muscle memory to, say, collect S-K-A-T-E or complete one-off challenges. Most of the time, it's done well, but others, such as the Cruise Ship's missing toolbox, add a whole new level of mystery and luck that may see you checking guides just to get them over and done with. Sometimes, it's just a modern tweak; no longer are you impressing the Neversoft Girls on the Cruise Ship, but fellow pro skaters. Luckily, you can adjust the in-level timer for up to 60 minutes, so you don't have to stress yourself out when mopping up what's missing or exploring — unless it's a competition stage, which remains at one minute for obvious reasons. You can even go full cheat mode to make sure you don't flub a long-grind stat point. Simple mistakes Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4 has some niggles, and we may as well get the most obvious one out of the way: the soundtrack is severely lacking. I'm not even kidding when I say that four songs from my wedding daytime playlist haven't returned to this remake. You get a small selection of ten or so favorites, including CKY's '96 Quite Bitter Beings', Agent Orange's 'Everything Turns Grey' and 'Amoeba' by Adolescents, but there are some huge omissions: 'Not the Same' by Bodyjar, 'TNT' by AC/DC, and Public Enemy's 'By the Time I Get to Arizona' are the most egregious. Gameplay-wise, this remake isn't too dependable with transitions, gaps, and off-ramp maneuvers. Getting a handful of collectables felt way more about luck than skill. There's also an odd recurring glitch where going straight from an ollie into a grind sees you eating asphalt — something the originals were surprisingly forgiving with. On a wider level, the amount of time and effort to max out just one skater's stats will likely put you off repeating the feat with more than two or three members of the roster. Having the option to max out stats globally would be great, but it's a personal preference. Then, of course, the omission of the OG career mode from THPS4 is massive, but really, I get it. Purists will hate me for saying it, but I prefer the old ways, and the consistency works when both games directly contribute to skater development and unlockables. And Bam Margera's back! Don't think, just play Despite its minor annoyances, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4 lives up to the hype and should be a day-one treat for gamers worldwide. For Xbox Game Pass subscribers, it's an absolute no-brainer. Even if you don't, you get a lot of bang for your buck for $50, especially if you're a dedicated completionist. As remakes go, it's one of the most faithful you'll ever play. Still, it's hard to shake the feeling that it doesn't hit the same high as the THPS 1+2 remake. This isn't Iron Galaxy's fault, either — the team has taken over Vicarious Visions' work seamlessly and done a spectacular job, particularly with those new levels — but the source material itself is a little lacking when compared to the original duo. It'll be nostalgia's fault to a certain extent — and the fact that the first two games needed a much more dramatic overhaul to get them up to modern standards — but certain levels feel a little dull or, at the very least, immediately forgettable. Perhaps THPS and THPS 2 were too iconic for their own good. So, what's next? Presuming we're going by canon, we can safely rule out the travesty that was Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 — but a Tony Hawk's Underground 1 + 2 would be a natural third outing. Hell, throw American Wasteland in there too while we're at it, because no-one wants Project 8 or Proving Ground. Oh, and maybe consider Mat Hoffman's Pro BMX while you're there.
Digital Trends
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Digital Trends
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4 gets a visual upgrade but stays wonderfully familiar
The year was 2001, and I was flat on my back in the middle of the street after bailing hard from a failed ollie. Once I dusted myself off, I decided to try again, but in a safer, more digital aspect. Two decades ago, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 devoured my free time, and now the remake is back and doing the exact same thing. An excellent remake, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4 brings two classic titles to a modern audience but adds little to the original experience in a way that leaves the game feeling curiously anachronistic. Recommended Videos THPS 3 remains largely untouched aside from a much-needed graphical update (my memory of how the game looked does not match reality). On the other hand, THPS 4 has been stripped down significantly; it no longer features a Career mode, and the larger, more open nature of its maps has been scaled back to fit the same two-minute gameplay timer as THPS 3. You can think of it like a level pack for the third game. In essence, THPS 3 + 4 is the same game with more levels, homogenized to fit a more streamlined experience. For series purists, this is a major downgrade. THPS 4 marked a turning point in the franchise, leading to later titles that were more open-world than the objective-focused gameplay of the first three. But if you want more of the same style of gameplay, the changes to THPS 4 are like a large cake: it's the same flavor, but there's more of it to enjoy. Dropping in to Canada felt like going home again, and revisiting Suburbia was like stopping by an old friend's house. Things looked a little different, but felt familiar and comfortable. All nine of the original THPS 3 levels made a comeback, but THPS 4 lost Carnival and Chicago, instead gaining three all-new maps: Waterpark, Movie Studio, and Pinball. These new additions make a near-perfect landing into the game with all the over-the-top shenanigans I would expect from a Tony Hawk level. Waterpark, with its empty, perfectly-shaped pools and endless grind-worthy slides, feels like such a natural fit that it's hard to believe it wasn't always there. But it's only familiar because I spent so much time with the franchise. For a newcomer to the series, the remake fumbles things. While a tutorial guides you through the basics, a full trick list is hidden inside the menu screen and divided into different sections. While that makes a certain amount of sense from an organizational perspective, it took far too long before I realized where it was. When most of the park goals include performing a specific trick, I turned to Google. The game would be better served by including a full trick list from the pause screen, in much the same way fighting games do. Every few levels is a heat, a set of three minute-long competitions between skaters where they're judged on performance and style. The game does a poor job of explaining how the system works. The key is to pull off a variety of tricks without bailing. Your overall total score, while important, doesn't have the same influence. You can rack up 50,000 points, but if you wiped out ten times while doing so, you're going to score low. The Game Mods options can lend a hand, though. You can turn on cheats that give you perfect balance during different tricks, ensure your Special bar is always full, and much more. Even with multiple cheats enabled, I struggled to beat some of the top performers. And I am fully aware it was a skill issue. What feels most out of place is the game's culture. When THPS 3 launched in 2001, it helped usher skateboarding culture to a wide number of people. It landed at a time when emo and pop punk bands exploded into the mainstream, with Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance dominating the airwaves. Many of the park-specific goals and the humor of THPS 3 + 4 feels like something you would find in an early 2000s movie, but it feels like it's missing something without the greater cultural context surrounding it. And it's hard to reconcile the soundtracks. Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 + 4 has more music than its original two games combined, but it isn't the same. Only six of the original 20 songs from THPS 3 made the cut, and a trifling four out of 35 returned from THPS 4. As glad as I am to hear Motorhead's 'Ace of Spades' playing while I grind a rail, the lack of The Ramones' 'Blitzkrieg Bop' leaves a glaring hole in the music. For the Tony Hawk franchise, its soundtrack is as iconic as the gameplay itself. To see such a massive change to the lineup is a bummer. I wouldn't have been opposed to new additions, but I found myself wishing old favorites would return. I only briefly looked into the multiplayer mode, but it seems promising. The Create-A-Park tool is sure to bring a lot of replayability to the game long after I've mastered (again) the single player modes. All in all, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 + 4 provides a satisfying (and at times challenging) experience that feels fitting for modern gamers while still delivering a heaping blast of nostalgia for those of us who grew up with the franchise. The lack of the original soundtrack is a disappointment, but new players will find the added songs match the vibes of the game. The gameplay seems straightforward at first, but leaves a lot of depth for those who want to master every map and learn to push their score into the millions. Plus, playing a skateboarding Doomguy was just plain fun.
The Guardian
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘It fully altered my taste in music': bands reflect on the awesome power of the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater soundtracks
When millions of parents bought their kids a Tony Hawk's Pro Skater game in the late 90s and early 00s, they couldn't have understood the profound effect it would have on their children's music taste. With bands from Bad Religion to Papa Roach and Millencolin accompanying every failed spin and grind, these trick-tastic games slyly doubled up as the ultimate compilation CD. While the Fifa games have an equally storied history with licensed music, those soundtracks feel impersonal – a who's who of whichever artists EA's associated record labels wanted to push at the time. Pro Skater's soundtrack, by contrast, felt like being handed a grubby and slightly dog-eared handmade mixtape, still battered from its last tumble at the local skate park. 'Most of the bands were chosen because I heard them growing up at the skate park. I would say most of the original punk stuff – even the early hip-hop – that was my soundtrack to skating in the 80s and 90s,' Tony Hawk says. 'I never imagined that I would be a tastemaker but, that was really just a byproduct of staying true to the culture.' 'Tony was very involved in punk rock,' says Chris DeMakes, frontman of Less Than Jake, before his set at this year's Slam Dunk festival. 'Ultimately, he had to approve the bands on his soundtrack … So that always kind of made me feel good about it.' The band's Roger Lima adds: 'The culture of skating and music is so meshed, it made sense for them to have a real soundtrack to it.' For the bands that made it on to these games in those years, the impact was immeasurable. 'I remember playing earlier versions of THPS and hearing some of our contemporaries … I hoped we'd get an opportunity like that,' says Hunter Burgan, bassist of AFI. 'But I don't think I really understood how big the impact was until after we actually were on the soundtrack. I can't tell you how many people have come up to me over the last two decades and told me that THPS3 was their first introduction to AFI.' 'Tony Hawk's Pro Skater made All My Best Friends Are Metalheads a hit – as big a hit as if we would have been on 60 major rock stations in America … Probably bigger,' says DeMakes. 'I talked to John Feldman [of Goldfinger] about this recently, and with Superman it's the same thing for them. That wasn't a worldwide hit, but it became a hit for them because of that game.' When the original Tony Hawk's Pro Skater came out in 1999, those grey PlayStation discs served as a punk rock Trojan horse, sneaking a killer introduction to the world of alt and punk music to millions of unsuspecting kids. A quarter-century later, new artists are featuring on modern remakes of the Pro Skater games, alongside the bands that shaped their taste. 'Those games fully altered my taste in music!' says Sammy Ciaramitaro, vocalist of hardcore band Drain. 'They brought punk rock (and a lot of other incredible music) to my childhood bedroom.' Drain are now one of a handful of new artists that were chosen to be added to the soundtrack for the remakes. 'I think our inclusion represents the growth of hardcore,' says Ciaramitaro. 'I'm honored that we now get to be a part of this with Turnstile and End It, too. I hope that maybe some young kids will hear our songs while playing and it will motivate them to do a deep dive into punk rock music, like we all did when we were younger.' Other bands who weren't quite big enough to get on Tony's radar at the time, such as the Ataris, spent their careers dreaming of making it on to the next Pro Skater game. 'We were coming of age the same time that Pro Skater was,' says bassist Mike Davenport. 'In 1999/2000 was when we really started to take off as a band and we didn't even feel as if we belonged with the bands that were featured [on the games].' The Ataris' track All Souls' Day eventually made the soundtrack for 2020's Pro Skater 1+2 remake. Davenport says that the band used to play Pro Skater constantly on tour in the back of an RV – even, once, in the middle of a car accident. 'My merch guy and I were playing in the kitchen nook one night when we heard the driver yell 'look out!' and then the TV flew at us, and we both literally batted it down with our hands so as not to have it smash us in the face,' he remembers. 'Sadly the TV and PlayStation were killed, but luckily not us.' Even though Less Than Jake reaped the rewards of being on the game back in 2002, returning with a different song on the Pro Skater remake decades later still felt like a badge of honour: 'We're a band that's been around for 33 years, so we love anything that can propel us and get us in front of a new audience,' says DeMakes, 'Everybody has social media. Anybody can upload their song to YouTube or Spotify or Apple Music now, it's a different playing field. So how do you get noticed? Getting asked to be in a video game is perfect.' 'As long as there are people playing video games there will be an avenue to connect them with music,' says Burgan, 'Skateboarding, punk rock and video games were a huge part of our lives growing up and were inextricably connected, so it seems like a natural continuation of that. For bands, I think the cultural impact is far more important and lasting than any financial benefit.' Such is the lasting impact of the Pro Skater soundtracks that there are cover bands dedicated to playing it live – among them the 900. 'We were really annoying when we first started the band, just tagging Tony Hawk in every story and Instagram post,' frontman Harry Shaw tells me. 'When he followed us [on social media] we thought: 'That's it, we've made it.' We never imagined that he'd actually come on stage with us.' In a video that's since gone viral on Instagram, Tony Hawk hopped on stage unannounced with the 900 in east London, covering Bloodstains by Agent Orange and Superman by Goldfinger, to a rapturous crowd. '[We're] eternally grateful for him doing that show, and also just not being a dick about bands covering songs from his game, either,' says Shaw, 'He doesn't have to do this stuff, his name is so big within pop culture – like Ronaldo or Messi – he's almost like a living meme.' 'There are five bands that only play covers from our video game series, and I've sang with three of them. But that one [the 900] was really fun,' says Hawk. 'My appearance was a surprise, and they were kind enough to choose songs that I was more into. Yes, I'm proud of the soundtrack, but I can't sing every song nor could I remember the lyrics!' In the decades that have passed since the original Pro Skater games, their soundtracks have been the gift that keeps giving for the bands who make it on. 'I actually just met Tony a few weeks ago at a music festival,' says AFI's Burgan. 'He is a true music lover and that makes being included in THPS even more special.' While Pro Skater has gone down in legend, Less Than Jake believes that it could have very easily gone the other way. 'How many stars do we know that have made products or endorsed things that weren't good?' laughs DeMakes. 'But in Tony's case, he had a really cool game that kids embraced and loved.' 'Pro Skater could have been a flop, it could have just not really worked out in the long run,' agrees Lima. 'But every element of it was just super effortlessly cool and it was huge for us … I can't count the amount of times someone has said: 'I found out about you guys through Pro Skater.' Just look at the YouTube comments … thousands and thousands of fans that probably never would have heard of us otherwise.' Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4 is out now
