Editorial | Tony Hawk's Pro Skater's Influence in Gaming.

By Sam Coles:

When you think of sports games you tend to roll your eyes as your mind reminds you the recycled nonsense each year, but they are not always bad and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater is one of them. Now I know what you are thinking “Sam Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater is not a sports game”, well it falls under extreme sports so I am counting it. Anyway digressions aside, I want to talk about what made the Pro Skater games special with the remake just around the corner (at the time of writing).

In the late 90’s skateboarding was on the brink of fading out of popularity, but Tony Hawk was invited to check out a prototype for a game by the folks at Neversoft. Tony loved the idea and began to give it his endorsement, every time a new build was made Tony would play it to check if it was okay and slowly it became the game that we would finally know as Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater released in 1999 on the PlayStation and other platforms later. To say it was a success would be a massive understatement, what made it special? Well there are many factors.

Let’s start off with gameplay which was and still is exceedingly fun to play, the controls are extremely simple to pick up and get the hang of, but on the other hand they were difficult to master. The gameplay loop in the Pro Skater games was fast, fluid and very addictive as it caters the arcade gamer where you want to keep besting your or other player’s high scores. It wasn’t particularly realistic, but that was not what they were going for, simplicity is the key to these games.

Pulling off a long string of combos was immensely satisfying, coupled with the cathartic audio ques when you leap across a gap or pull off special moves. The original game it was a bit harder to pull long combos, but in the later instalments they added in the manual a subtle but important change to the series. This increased the possibility of combos, where you would see almost absurd high scores which looked to be inhuman levels of ridiculousness.

The campaign mode is what also kept people coming back too, now it’s not like they had stories which they didn’t (mostly) but the different challenges in each location which kept things fresh. You had the usual ones such as get this high score or find the secret video tape which was a staple in the series, but you would have certain challenges in each level that was thematically appropriate. This mix of player freedom and structure at the same time, crafted an additive gameplay experience that is still fun to play today.

Pro Skater had a cultural impact too, lots of gamers played these games despite them having no interest in skateboarding and some even picked up a deck and tried to get into it myself included. It paved the way for a new generation of skaters and music, where you would hear Superman from Goldfinger playing at several parties a week.

Now this wouldn’t be an article about Pro Skater if I didn’t mention the licensed soundtrack, this game brought a lot of punk bands into the mainstream back in the day such as Lagwagon, Bad Religion, NOFX, Rancid, Goldfinger and many more. This is how I experienced these bands the first time round, and it being a PS1 disc I would frequently put it into a CD player and listen to the music. Even later down the line it would introduce different genres such as heavy metal and hip-hop, with bands and groups such as Motörhead and Jurassic 5 making appearances in playlists.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater is truly a great series of games (except 5, we don’t talk about that game), and it makes me so happy to see the first two games make a comeback with the current generation of gaming. Maybe once again it can create a new generation of skaters, we shall see.