Off the heels of our Dirge for Twisted Metal and Retrospective on Yoko Taro, and with the agony of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5 still fresh I decided it’s time to delve once again into our collective video game history with the Tony Hawk franchise. Now please be aware for the sake of article space I cut off a few games, including Downhill Jam and a ton of portable ports, but you don’t care about those anyway.
This is Terrible Tuesdays: A Requiem for a Hawk.
req·ui·em
ˈrekwēəm/Submit
noun
(especially in the Roman Catholic Church) a Mass for the repose of the souls of the dead.
a musical composition setting parts of a requiem Mass, or of a similar character.
an act or token of remembrance.
“he designed the epic as a requiem for his wife”
So the Tony Hawk series isn’t dead. Not quite yet. It may even see a revival with Tony Hawk Pro Skater Fifffffhahahaha. But let us perform the eulogy anyway.
The year is 1994. Three young studs, Joel Jewitt, Mick West and Chris Ward set off to found their own video game studio. The entrepreneurs broke off from Malibu Interactive – A subsidiary of the since defunct Malibu Comics, a comic book publisher you might know for such great hits as ‘The Night Man.” It was the 16-bit garage era of games where you didn’t need a team of about 500 VFX animators and questionably outsourced Asian labor to complete your titles. Neversoft’s first major task came from Playmates Interactive Entertainment, an arm of Playmates Toys, working on a single title (Skeleton Warriors, if you’re curious) that would carry them from the 16 bit era through the 32 bit era.
Shortly after delivering Skeleton Warriors, Neversoft would begin development on a Crystal Dynamics Ghost Rider title. This would ultimately be cancelled, and Neversoft would shift gears to an in-house project titled “Big Guns”, which they shopped around to publishers and Sony displayed a keen interest in. Meanwhile Neversoft would continue to work for Playmates, porting the PC version of the frenetic third person shooter MDK. applying much of what they learned developing Big Guns to said port. What do shooters have to do with Skateboarding? Everything it turns out. Neversoft would soon enter hard times, with MDK proving tougher to port than originally thought and Sony dropping them like it’s hot after forcing them to make extensive changes to Big Guns.
What was a downy soft fledgling games company to do? Neversoft knocked on doors only to have each one closed on them, as is the way things go, when the light finally shone upon them as they entered the sights of Activision. Activision was looking for someone to help capitalize off a young and sexy action hero star of the time; Bruce Willis. Activision had a game titled ‘Apocalypse’ that featured the star’s visage and voice, but nothing that was in any kind of presentable or playable shape. However, having Neversoft break out the Big Guns (eh?) and giving it the Apocalypse skin turned out to be the exact right move for all parties.
Activision decided they liked these thar Neversoft guys. So they hired them to create another game, a skateboarding game this time, recruiting out of Apocalypse staff to develop it. Neversoft’s initial game mirrored an arcade racer called ‘Top Skater’. and with no one dedicated to developing character models they used Bruce Willis likeness as a temporary skate avatar. The object of the game was to race your boards down a giant hill and get to the finish line as fast as possible. There was a slight problem however, players who had reached the bottom of the hill, often a full minute before the second player caught up, had nothing to do. So Neversoft threw in a little digital skate park to screw around in as an early reward to the skater that won.
As it turned out this was more fun than the actual game. When Neversoft concluded work on Apocalypse they dedicated the entirety of their 16 person staff to working on the skating title. The team decided to continue to incorporate and improve upon the Big Guns/Apocalypse engine they designed in both this skating title and a Spider-man title they intended to release in 2000. Crazy acrobatic physics are born!
Activision and the Neversoft team took a version of the skating demo to legendary vert skater Tony Hawk, and Tony Hawk gave it his huge chowdery seal of approval. The racing aspect was dropped from the game entirely, instead with the focus on pulling big if physically impossible tricks. Tony Hawk Pro Skater is born.
Tony Hawk Pro Skater
This is the game that kicked it all off. Kind of like how morphine and penicillin created the basis for all western medicine, Tony Hawk created the basis for almost everything in the extreme sports genre of video games (more on that later). Ollies, flip tricks, grab tricks and lip/grind tricks made up the very base level of gameplay. Players got a score that was calculated on the following factors: complexity of trick performed, number of tricks performed in sequence, rotation on trick and times the same trick has been completed (with diminishing returns on performing the same trick repeatedly in a sequence). A “bail” – falling off your board – would trash your score and reset your special meter.
The engine Neversoft developed for Apocalypse made it possible to show in-game video of live, real world footage. So the major incentive in the first Tony Hawk was collecting several VHS tapes to unlock real life skate videos. Fucken sweet dude. You would only have two minutes to collect any of these five tapes, which were usually tied to an objective including reaching a high score or collecting the letters S-K-A-T-E. It had a boss rockin’ soundtrack and was endorsed by the big skaters and brands of the time.
The original Tony Hawk sold gangbusters, reached critical acclaim and changed the face of skateboarding games for the next decade until competitor Skate would come along and innovate further. Some even say there was a rise in interests in skateboarding as a direct result of the franchise, and though there were certainly other influences at the time such as the film Z-Boys of Dogtown and MTV’s reality shows, we’ve seen this kind of interplay before where one medium directly impacts the reach of another. What I’m saying is Tony Hawk Pro Skater was revolutionary, in more ways than one. And like all revolutions, you either go out in a great blaze of glory or create a state of destitution.
Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2
Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 introduced the Manual to the franchise. It may not sound like much, but it completely changed the way you would play the game in both Pro Skater 2 and all future games. I mean, this thing was a staple. Goals were expanded, levels were expanded, and for the first time ever – You could create your own skater. This was a grand leap in the Tony Hawk franchise, and a step forward of this kind would only kinda sorta be repeated once more with Tony Hawk Underground. For all intents and purposes, this is what a sequel is supposed to be. It did have one problem, the “big drop” system that felt like a hold over from the game it never was. If you ollied off a large spot and didn’t react to a warning icon in time, you would bail, hard. The “Big Drop” mechanic was kind of the instant death of skating games. Bye bye combo. Bye bye life.
Intermission: Activsion O2
Activision O2 was created in 2001 to capitalize off the success of Tony Hawk, because if one X Game was popular, why not ALL the X Games? BMX, Surfing, Snowboarding, Wakeboarding, Motorcross and Parkour. Each of them played very similar to Tony Hawk and was endorsed by a star from their respective fields. When audiences proved they didn’t really give a shit about those other sports the games not yet made would subsequently be cancelled or repurposed and Activision O2 would be dissolved. BMX would resurface in American Wasteland, while Snowboarding would come back in Shred (with surfing rumored), while Motorcross would reappear as MTX Motorax. Also I made the Parkour part up.
Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3
For many this was the sweetspot, and if it wasn’t your fondest Tony Hawk game it was definitely in your top two or top three. THPS3 was perhaps the closest thing to “skating perfection” in the franchise before it tried a bunch of radical ideas to start pushing the brand. Pro Skater 3 also brought in an important trick that, while not quite the Manual, would be just as vital to stringing your combos, connecting your vert to your street skating and getting those big scores: The Revert. There was also the bar balance for grind tricks and lip tricks and the introduction of Hidden Combos. Just as importantly, it got rid of the maligned Big Drop mechanic. It was also the first game to allow female Create-A-Skaters, don’t forget those ladies that shred. While future installments would introduce a few more mechanics that would definitely open up the series (getting off your board, anyone?) it’s hard to knock this off its pedestal as one of the top games.
Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4
Pro Skater 4 is perhaps the point in the franchise when Neversoft begins playing with the ideas of RPG like “quests,” a free roam with no time limit and storylines that begin to float away from the ‘get off your board and skate’ purity of the series and begins to bog down the gameplay with, how do I put this nicely… More gimmicks than Inspector Gadget keeps in his hat. There was a very ‘Jackass’ kind of feel behind Pro Skater 4 with objectives such as racing down Alcatraz in a shopping cart. It was still fun, mind you, but it marked the long beginning to a long end. It did try a mix of failed and successful mechanics, only two of which would be seen in other games, the spine transfer (I would say very important) and vehicle skitching (I could live without it.)
Tony Hawk Underground
A near complete departure from the Pro Skater series, Tony Hawk Underground took Pro Skater 4’s career mode and turned it into a full bore story mode. Neversoft wanted to focus on the theme of individuality and took you back to your basics, and for the first time you the player were truly the star of the show, an amateur on the meteoric rise to skateboarding fame. The story was loosely based on the life of skating star Mike Vallely, and a digital recreation of the man partially mentors you on your journey to the top. You are challenged by constant frenemy… budtagonist… blood rival Eric Sparrow as the two of you make your journey across the globe and get up to a few criminal antics.
I’ll admit right now that Tony Hawk Underground is perhaps the highlight of the Tony Hawk games for me, with THPS3 following closely behind. There was just something about being the star of the show, struggling against all odds and proving your worth to the skating legends. That story deeply affected me when I was younger, and it would continue to have an impact until.. Well… The second time Neversoft told that story, then the third, then the fourth, and the fifth, and in a franchise that had nothing to do with skating whatsoever. Right.
I hit on this earlier but you could get off your board. Get. Off. Your. Board people!!! This made it worlds easier to navigate terrain and take control of your combos by doing a “caveman” on to your board at any time or jumping off when you realized you were headed for a bail, this also enabled you to use the ‘Acid Drop’ to slam into a quarterpipe. You could also drive and there was also stealth but, even ex-convicts can be forgiven.
Tony Hawk Underground 2
Neversoft told a tale in the first Underground that was thoughtful, soulful, and felt as though it were a digital documentary on a gritty real world skater. So why not take everything they built and completely throw that out the window? Welcome to THUG 2, where we trade in soul for cash. THUG2 wasn’t so much a story driven game as it was a Viva la Bam! Cash in. No, seriously, this game was literally Viva La Bam!
For those not in the know, Viva La Bam! was one of many insanely popular MTV Reality series, in which pro skateboarder and Jackass alumnus Bam Margera got up to antics that often resulted in physical harm to he and his cast mates and lots and lots of property damage. THUG2 more famously re-creates among the most popular episodes of Bam; Mardi-Gras Part 1 and Mardi-Gras Part 2, because they did so well for MTV and drove interests in real world locations such as anarchist Skate park Skatopia, Neversoft would also no doubt make bank off that Viva la Bam! fame.
It was no longer about you, the amateur skater as it was tailing Bam and his cast mates around the globe, which depending on your tastes could be kind of cool. The game also came with a few problems, including goals that were kind of opaque and challenges that felt half hearted. Still it felt at least a little tighter control wise and graphics wise than Underground, with a bigger soundtrack, so that’s something right?
You now had the FREAK OUT! ARGH! FFFFF! FUZZ! To grab yourself some pity points if you bailed. Classic Mode also makes a return. Very importantly, perhaps most importantest, you could trigger a ‘focus ‘ability that gave you pinpoint accuracy on your tricks and combos. Yet another way to score big. Did I forget the natas spin? Eh. You probably didn’t… Natas it.
American Wasteland
Neversoft heard your gripes about having lost that struggling amateur skater and gave you… Yet another struggling amateur skater. American Wasteland was, once again, a promise that we would get back to the skating basics. It certainly had that indie movie vibe of “smalltown kiddo gits outta town and makes sumtin o’ demselves” complete with characters such as Asshole Mentor with a Heart of Gold and Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but Neversoft took the notion of being an “amateur” skater a little too far.
See, in most Tony Hawk games you start out with a limited number of stats you have to build up by meeting certain challenges or completing certain tasks. However in these games you could also pull off any trick or technical maneuver right off the bat. American Wasteland decided to strip you completely of all your moves starting out the gate. Every. Single. One. No manuals. No reverts. No wall rides. No wall plants. Not even a Special meter. You could play the severely gimped classic mode to try and recapture anything close to Tony Hawk gameplay or, you could force yourself to sit through the story to unlock more levels and slowly, slowly gather the skills back that probably come natural as a veteran player. Fair enough you could get them back in relatively short order but the fact they were torn away in the first place felt, well, asinine.
The game also only featured one geographical location, a departure from the globetrotting of all the prior games. You played in a “seamless” version of Los Angeles, and in aping the open world of games like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas you kind of realized how limited it was compared to well… San Andreas. Oh, the game also gave you the Bert Slide, and while it looked cool as hell there was no real practicality to it.
The big draw of American Wasteland was building your own skatepark over the course of the game. Sounds great, right? Problem is, Create-a-Park mode had sorta kinda been in the game since Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2.
Project 8
American Wasteland was back to basics. But. Now. Project 8 is REALLY back to basics. You start out as an amateur skater making a name for them… Fucks sake.
In this title you are the world’s 200th Ranked Skateboarder. No I’m not making that up, in some sort of bizarre Suda 51 riff your job is to make it from place 200 to one of Tony Hawk’s top 8 ranked in the world. The levels were much bigger but they were also just rehashes of Pro Skater levels Suburbia, School, Downtown and Warehouse. All of which you’ve probably also played again in either Undergrounds and Wastelands classic or story modes. For some bizarre reason the Create-A-Character function was massively scaled back, with females eliminated and players only able to choose from three basic templates.
Difficulty options were kinda sorta tweaked for the better, instead of choosing whether you would play the game on “Easy” “Normal” or “Sick” out the gate, each individual goal would be awarded a medal depending on your skill. While it was the first Tony Hawk released for generation 7 consoles it was clear Neversoft was kind of lacking in the ‘innovations’ department.
Don’t lose heart! For Project 8 at least introduces the Nail a Trick option, where you could slow down the action and use your game platform’s of choice analog sticks to rotate your foot, kick your board and really rack up the points. It was cool. It was exciting. It was frustrating yet fun… And it brought with it exactly none of the gameplay expansion and innovation the manual, revert, caveman and focus before it did.
Proving Ground
So I can’t move on to Proving Ground without mentioning EA’s Skate franchise. Skate came screaming on to the scene like a board out of hell (eh?) one month before Neversoft released Proving Ground. Skate completely changed how skateboard games were played. While Tony Hawk still relied on an outdated physics model that made impossible tricks possible, Skate set out to capture real world physics and how it felt to actually step on a board. Instead of trying to pull big numbers for your score, Skate’s sense of reward came from hitting that trick that felt just out of reach for you. Rather than imputing button combos, Skate relied on twin analogue sticks making gameplay feel both smooth and nuanced. Skate brought with it better graphics, bigger environments and an emphasis on player agency.
Proving Ground meanwhile introduced “Nail the Grab” and “Nail the Manual.” Very back to basics.
I mean that’s something, right?
But I’m sure Activision and Neversoft can do it! I’m sure you can meet this new upstart of a contender, rise to the challenge and take your crown back. At the very least give us the skateboard video game genre’s equivalent to Marvel and DC, challenging, even stealing each other’s ideas yet pushing out a more successful product each time. Or! OR!
Re-purpose your skateboard team to make games with plastic guitars and hire a new team to make a plastic skateboard.
Tony Hawk Ride
I want to say the beginning of the end happened somewhere between American Wasteland and Proving Ground but the truth is each of those games was actually liked to some degree by some audience.
Not like Ride. Ride was properly reviled by all.
Tony Hawk, smartphone app developer Robomodo and a series of bored looking skaters did their damndest to convince us all through life the only thing we’ve been waiting on to complete our empty souls was a hard plastic peripheral you could let collect dust on your living room floor. In full view of any family or house guests. Why buy a real board for roughly the same cost of this game when you could buy a fake board and pretend to skate?
And this isn’t like the snarky, general comparison between a Rockband or Guitar Hero instrument and the real deal. The Ride board was actually the relative size of a real skateboard and about twice as unruly. In the time it took you to get the goddamn Ride board to do anything you could be riding a real complete deck on shaky knees. What I’m saying is the Ride was a flat out unresponsive piece of trash, but that’s not what Tony Hawk would have you believe:
And Tony Hawk would never lie to you.
Tony Hawk Shred
Is it possible your previous game did so astronomically bad that your next game only sold 3000 copies?
Yes.
Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5
And so we reach the present. Much like Back to the Future’s promises of a newer, brighter tomorrow in the year 2015 we reach the predicted date only to be faced with disappointment and vast sorrow.
Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5 was released last fall to, what turned out to be, incredibly justified skepticism. Robomodo has proven not just once, but on three separate occasions they were incompetent when it came to developing Tony Hawk titles. After Ride and Shred they went on to create a subpar quotation mark “High Definition” end quote port of Pro Skater where they had a difficult time getting the physics of Tony Hawk to play nice with the Unreal 3 engine. They also got rid of a ton of features that improved upon prior installments of the series (such as the revert) while reincorporating things players hated (big drop) because it was a ‘remake.’ After Tony Hawk Ride met with negative criticisms and poor sales Robomodo approached pro skateboarder and physicist Yung Tae Kim to help them fix their shitty game. Their response to Dr. Kim’s criticisms of their shit game being shit? “Eh, we’ll fix what we can but we’re not too worried about it.”
Remember. Robomodo consulted Neversoft staff on Pro Skater 5 in the same way they consulted Dr. Kim on Ride. If they can’t be bothered listening to a guy who literally owns a Ph. D in skating, why did anyone honestly believe they listened to some guys who just really love skateboard games?
Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5 takes us back to basics. By basics I figure they meant “the basics of cellphone app programming” because this game is little better than a flash title that gets you an A- in a freshman computer coding class. I should know, I actually made one. Jay’s College Flash Game featured a boy who really wanted to make toast with all sorts of strange obstacles getting in his way, such as pillars of fire and spinning tomahawks. The game was incredibly random with a thought process behind it I would be incapable of recreating today even if I put every iota of concentration and imagination behind it. The same can be said of Tony Hawk 5. I’m not sure why destroying drones or growing to Super Mario giant sizes in a skate park was deemed a necessary part of the gameplay, I have exactly zero clue what dictated those design choices other than “This is a Tony Hawk game and weird things need to happen.” Of course this is a minor nitpick in the greater tragedy of Tony Hawk 5. It’s kind of like surviving the Titanic and complaining that your least fond memory is of the music the band played that night.
I know up until this point this article has been an educational lesson in the history of Tony Hawk, and Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5 is no exception. The game stars a ton of female and minority skaters which is a complete turn around from the white frat dude bro feel of the previous games. Now don’t get me wrong, I had no issue with playing the titles as the likes of Mike V or Bam Margarita in prior games (which Mike V has his own line of hit skateboard games in case you missed them). But with the likenesses of Leticia Bufoni, Nyjah Hudson, Lizzie Armanto, Ishod Weir, David Gonzalez and globally recognized master level skater Lil’ Wayne it’s hard to not consider how the game is landmark in its inclusion of pro skating’s new faces.
It’s just a shame that they’re recognized in a title that is not only a monumental waste of time, but goes beyond scouring your wallet to pure time theft. When you’re knocking at St. Peter’s gate he’ll cast you down to Satan’s doorstep for spending time installing and uprgrading this game instead of spending those precious moments with your family. I can’t even begin to measure what’s wrong with this title in a single article, it would take an entire review, so it’s a good thing I already did that. To sum it all up this game required a 7 gig day 1 update to make it even remotely playable, and it was still bad.
Perhaps Tony Hawk stands as a monument as to why what was great in the 90s needed to stay in the 90s. Look at everything we got in the 90s that was fantastic. The Matrix. Will Smith. Rugrats. Now look at everything we got in the 90s that was turned terrible by the prior two decades. See my point? Or maybe Tony Hawk stands as a sterling example of the interplay between nostalgia and cynicism. Companies that look down on fans and franchises so much they figure we’re good for little more than a cash grab, and so they take our fondest memories and manipulate them against us for the sake of padding their vaults with a few extra dollars they really don’t even need.
So maybe that’s it for Tony Hawk, maybe it’s not, but the truth is there was no collective unconscious that decided the skateboard franchise was dead. It was decided for us. Skate 3 still has a very active community with an estimated global 4 million units in lifetime sales. There are still wide swaths of people out there celebrating Tony Hawk Underground 2, and the thought of a real Tony Hawk title after over a half decade of inactivity did make folks misty eyed. So maybe we’ll see another Tony Hawk or a Skate that really does re-capture the magic, or maybe it rolls into the endless abyss and we all play Mike V’s Skateboard Party through tears of sadness on our smartphones. For now though it seems Tony Hawk is only good for the same thing handcrafted hipster skateboard decks are, taking a lot of your money to never be used and collect dust on the wall of your SoHo rented studio apartment.
