Top 10! Tony Hawk’s Games
Do you know what this website has been missing? Lists! And it’s about time someone came in and fixed that, the someone specifically being me, who is writing this one now.
Today, we’re tackling the Tony Hawk’s games. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 is on the horizon, in what seems like the most half-hearted possible bid to make Tony Hawk relevant once more. It’s being positioned in a similar way that every Sonic game was between Sonic 06 and Sonic Generations, as a nostalgic return to form which caters to most people’s early experience with the series. As someone who played those games every year upon release for seven years, I think “it’s like the good ol’ ones!” is a really unfair way of approaching a series that has been far more varied and vibrant than that. It deserves a little more respect and a little bit of a closer look, which is what we’re going to give it today!
So join me, as I take you on a journey from worst to best, and we take a look at just what makes the Birdman good, what makes the Hawkman bad, and just why we should even care at all. I ended up writing a lot about these games, which won’t surprise anyone, so today we’re tackling the first five games in the list, and next time we’ll have the grand conclusion to the video game tale of Anthony Frank Hawk.
10: Pro Skater HD
Back in 2012, Activision made its first attempt at bringing back that hot Tony Hawk’s brand. After the success of Guitar Hero (and Neversoft’s move to that franchise), the series had attempted and failed to become a successful peripheral title of its own, despite the fact that there possibly isn’t a franchise that would translate less to peripheral control. Tony Hawk’s is a series defined by your ability to move through space at speed, interacting with as many objects as possible along the way, and Ride and Shred were doomed from their very inception.
After their abject and total failure, Robomodo were given the chance to bring Tony Hawk back onto Xbox Live Arcade, with levels and mechanics identical to those from the original two games. What wasn’t identical was the physics system, and playing Pro Skater HD is an instant lesson in the importance of feel. You’re heavier, you’re slower, your relationship to your body and space made different in individually imperceptible ways that combine to undermine the entire effect of the game.
In many ways, Pro Skater HD existence is incredibly important in highlighting what forms the core of the series’ identity. It’s not the formal structures of the game design, or the progression of the levels, or even the specifics of the controls. Pro Skater HD makes it clear that despite the series’ arcadey identity, it is just as focused on the connection between player and body within its own abstracted reality as its more grounded competitor/successor, Skate. An important fact which would perhaps be lost without this game to make it so obvious for all.
9: Pro Skater 4
It’s no secret that Pro Skater 3 is considered the high watermark of the series. It’s the game in which the revert was added, making endless combos possible and thus cementing what the identity of Tony Hawk’s was to be going forward. But the 2 minute, arcadelike progression of Pro Skater 3 was untenable for appealing to a modern audience. And with this was born the one problem that the series would spend the rest of its lifetime attempting to solve: how to marry the open movement through a space which is the core of Tony Hawk’s popularity with a structure that bolsters the game up to a satisfying length that would sell to an audience in 2002.
Pro Skater 4 did not have a solution. It allowed players to ride around in free-roam and attempt to build a score, before picking and choosing specific goals which counted towards the progression. It was the worst of both worlds, punishing players for engaging with the game’s systems in the way open way they were designed to be engaged with, whilst limiting those system’s possibilities during the moments of the game designated as important. The game may have felt even better than Pro Skater 3, with more lenient balance meters and tightened up movement, but it never gave people a reason to play.
In many ways, to look at the journey of Tony Hawk’s is to look at the effects of external structures of game design upon a fairly constant core interactions of play. After Pro Skater 3, every game Neversoft made always felt amazing, but they were able to extract wildly different effects based on the ways they structured the interactions with that experience through goals, levels and progression. It’s why I think the post-3 games are more interesting to consider than those which came before, even if playing some of them is less than ideal.
8: Underground
Underground will always have a special place in my heart as the first Tony Hawk’s game I owned. I only got my Xbox in 2003, and even though I had played the hell out of the prior two games at a friends house, I had an ownership of Underground that made that game feel like it was mine. It didn’t matter that the game was almost entirely constructed on a foundation of unthinkably wrong decisions at each and every turn, I could play it whenever I wanted and that was enough.
It’s partially for that personal connection that it comes in above Pro Skater 4, but also that the one thing Underground has which its predecessor doesn’t is consistency. Pro Skater 4 is an incoherent game, one which plays well but can’t figure out what to do with itself on any level. Underground instead knows exactly what it is, a gritty east-coast story of a rags to riches skater. The story is on each and every level appalling, and it removes any sense of fun or vibrancy from the game’s level design, but it gives the game a real sense of identity.
The game was structurally identical to Pro Skater 4, with only discrete goals which trapped the player counting towards story progression. But with the game’s identity came also a character identity, grounding the previously purposeless free play segments within the life and experience of the created character. This specificity gives Underground the edge over its predecessor, and proves that a misguided and crappy identity is always going to be better than no identity at all.
7: Pro Skater
Given the impact and influence the game went on to have, it’s wholly unfair to call the orignial Pro Skater a bad game. However, it’s entirely fair to call it a bad Tony Hawk’s game, at least in the context of the series as a complete entity. Like a pilot of a television show that would go on to become great, Pro Skater didn’t quite know what it had yet.
The moveset — whilst far more complete than any skating game before it — was limited without manuals and reverts that forced emphasis on the design of the environment. With more punishing physics and difficult tricks, it was a puzzle game in which the the goal was to find the explicitly design lines within the space, rather than giving you the agency and tools to freely express yourself within the space.. As Chris Franklin first pointed out, it has less in common philosophically with Tony Hawk’s, and instead shares its approach with EA’s Skate.
And Skate is a fantastic game, an at the time perfect complement to Tony Hawk’s more ridiculous approach, I’d love to live in the world in which both series kept going until this day. But in a world in which later series Tony Hawk’s exists as an evolution into something else entirely, and Skate exists as a far more effective version of these ideas, the original Pro Skater is unfortunately little more than a historical curiosity.
6: American Wasteland
American Wasteland comes from a place of extreme desperation. Maybe the desperation wasn’t as obvious at the time, but looking back it is palpable in every single decision the game happens to make. It came out in 2005, when skating culture was back to being a thing some kids did yet most ignored, and blink-182 were two years broken up. Yet instead of confronting the fact that the zeitgeist is long done by this point, American Wasteland reaches back into the past, drenching itself in nostalgia for the 80s west coast skater punk scene, complete with a narrative about bringing things back to the good ol’ days.
But American Wasteland‘s desperation runs deeper than its stylistic trappings; which despite their mistimed nostalgia give the game and its world a real sense of cohesion. It’s the fifth entry in as many years on the same engine, an unchanged foundation upon which every year has been built another three stories of increasingly complex mechanics. The game practically creaks with the weight of itself, trying to reach out to newcomers with the way the moveset unlocks gradually, but refusing to shed anything unnecessary. All this is compounded with yet another story mode focused on individually constructed missions; the game constantly limiting you despite the hilariously large moveset and the chained-together open world.
Despite this, I really like American Wasteland. It’s a grand tower, one in the process of falling down but one you can’t believe made it as high as it did at all. There’s something victory-lap esque about the game’s overstuffed systems, a culmination and celebration of the last five years of skating excess. Despite the tutorial attempts made in the campaign, the game is downright hostile to new players, but for the familiar it’s a bittersweet goodbye to what was and always be the heyday of skating games, to Tony Hawk’s on the PS2.
And then there are seeds. The way stats are upgraded with objectives that can be done any time in free-skate, the way the side missions are spread out around the map, the series beginning to finally work out how to incentive play within this open playground it has built. In 2005, with both wider pop culture and video games shifting away from the Birdman, would any of these go onto grow into something special in the later games, or would time wash Tony Hawk’s away from our shores?
5: Proving Ground
I’ll be honest with you — Proving Ground is a hard game to quantify. It is, for all intents and purposes, the final Tony Hawk’s game, released by a Neversoft that had already been set to work making Guitar Hero as its primary thing, against a brand new skating game that blew it out of the water. And it is not anywhere close to the final swansong that series deserves, so as Neversoft’s last bow it takes on this extra layer of disappointment.
And not because it’s bad — it isn’t at all — but because the thing that it aims for is such a misguided target. Proving Ground is a game all about authenticity, about staying true to yourself and deciding who you want to be, the campaign constructed to allow maximum self expression through the skateboarding mechanics in a bunch of different directions. The problem, obviously, is that’s the same target Skate was aiming for, a game which hits it with such perfect accuracy that Proving Ground appears lifeless.
Which is a shame because it feels so good, perhaps better than ever. The fantastic Nail-The-Trick system is expanded in crucial ways, all of which serve to allow the player greater control of the pacing, turning the combo into something more nuanced than just an ever-increasingly tense form of environmental traversal. After eight games, the balance meters are redesigned from small indicators to screen-wide translucent bars, taking cues from shooter design to let the player’s eyes focus on the environment that they’re moving through.
It falls down where Tony Hawk’s had always fallen down, in the way it structures its progression. This focus on authenticity serves to split the campaign into three distinct modes of play (Career, Hardcore and Rigger), all of which are advanced by even more specific missions, and suddenly this freedom to choose your identity instead restricts the expressive movement that is the core of the entire series.
So perhaps Proving Ground is the perfect ending for the series, the best of those nine years held back by the worst of those nine years, the core frustrations and tensions of the past near-decade encapsulated together as the final curtain fell.
4: Pro Skater 2
For me, Pro Skater 2 is hard to talk about. I never played it when I was younger, and have no context for what it was like to approach without the knowledge of Post-3 Tony Hawk’s. So its improvements feel less like improvements to me, and more like this strange mid-point before Pro Skater 3 arrives at the first iteration of what Tony Hawk came to be.
Which is unfair, because Pro Skater 2 is excellent. It takes the ideas present in the first game and loosens up restrictions on execution while expanding the moveset to allow lines to be chained together with manuals. It’s approachable in a way its predecessor was not, the first game in the series to really invite the player to participate in using its skateboarding system as a tool of self expression.
It’s limited mostly by hardware, the PSOne doing its best to deliver this dream of wide-open areas, spaces to be discovered, that discovery giving us a sense of ownership. This is the first Tony Hawk’s game in which these spaces feel like our spaces, spaces with which we share immense power, and through understanding them can achieve impossible things. Eventually, the series would become too sprawling and combos too easy to hit this sweet spot between knowable and mysterious, but Pro Skater 2 cemented it as a core value.
3: Underground 2
To anyone with familiarity with Tony Hawk’s, Underground 2‘s placement so high is probably the most surprising part of the list. It’s often held up as the series’ original nadir, the moment in which any and all semblance of being about Skateboarding was lost and instead being just a Jackass game. And that’s a fair point — since Pro Skater 4 the series had centered its personality more and more, often playing as a Grand Theft Auto-esque juvenile attempt at satire of american values. In the last game you collected donuts for cops, in the next game the gas station was a 69!
The reason Underground 2 is such a great entry has little to do with its personality, but said personality is at its brightest and most enjoyable in this game. It’s just as juvenile, but there’s an earnestness about its colorful environments and consistent slapstick hijinks, the additions of sheer ridiculousness hit just as often as they miss. It was the perfect response to Underground‘s drab locations and Quake 2 colour palette.
It was also the perfect response to Underground‘s structure. After turning goals into discrete one-and-done events in the two games before, Underground 2 was the first game after Pro Skater 3 to really make an attempt at addressing the series’ core dissonance. Now, there was no difference between free-skate and goals, instead the goals could be accomplished at any time, and each gave points towards unlocking the next level. With a surprising amount of success, the series was able to recapture that sense of expressive freedom without the arcade-like timer ticking away.
The guest characters and the vehicle sections may stray into a gimmicky territory that distracts from the game’s rather consistent focus, but no Tony Hawk’s game is perfect. What Underground 2 is, is defiant. It proves the series was, at that time, here to stay. The genre it had inspired had all but faded away, and Tony Hawk’s could have continued to spin its wheels and fade into immediate obscurity, but it wasn’t going to go down easy.
2: Pro Skater 3
When people talk about Tony Hawk’s, they are almost always talking about Pro Skater 3. It was the first entry on the PS2, it was the first entry with online play, it was the first entry where you could revert. It expands upon the promise of the PSOne entries and turns the series into something comparatively massive, with levels that feel like playgrounds, full of lines, spots, modifiers and little, all important crafted touches.
The first Pro Skater was heavy and sluggish (in Tony Hawk’s terms), and 2 had gone a ways to lightening the play but was limited by the choppiness of its hardware. In one of the most prominent examples of a leap in technology directly leading to improvement, Pro Skater 3 is smooth, the game’s movement combining with the more lenient balance metres to make that impressive 50,00 point combo finally a possibility. It was the first game in the series I ever played, and it hit young me with this very immediately understandable form of movement through the space, yet had a skill ceiling which I have not even come close to reaching.
And honestly, the series never hit that point again. I may love the games that follow, but they are all building on this, and all rely to some degree on a familiarity with the ideas of the series. Pro Skater 3 is the perfect entry point, the easiest way to understand the series, and even if I disagree with its particular canonization above all else, I understand why it got to be that way. There wouldn’t have been any more Tony Hawk’s without it.
1: Project 8
They did it.
Project 8 had an impossible task, to somehow reinvigorate a series which could not escape irrelevance. No longer could Tony Hawk’s subsist as this icon of skater punk culture, because the year was 2006 and the world had moved on many years ago. In hindsight, it was clear that the series’ days were numbered at this point, but it wasn’t going to disappear as this adolescent remnant of an older time. Instead, with Project 8, Tony Hawk’s did the very last thing you could have expected: it grew up.
It’s still full of the series’ trademark irreverence, it’s not a game that displays an overt maturity or anything, but there is a restraint and cohesion to the design that puts Project 8 head and shoulders above other post-3 Hawk games. The areas flow into one another organically, aesthetically exaggerated without being gross, for a series all about traversal through and interaction with a space, Project 8 gives the best space the series ever had. It moves from the low-poly pastiche of earlier entries, to something evocative, combining the grounded with the outlandish to create a space expressing the series’ theme of the city as a skating playground.
Project 8 is evocative with its approach to space, but crucially it is evocative with its approach to your body too. Movement is wild, with expressive animations — kickflips kick harder, grabs grab further — cementing you within the space, both equally cartoonish, both equally real. With Proving Ground‘s move to increased realism, it lost Project 8‘s all important tangible unreality.
All of this is held together by the best form of progression the series ever had, the Project 8 list. The entire game was framed as a competition, a leaderboard of sorts. The ranks can be rised through with any activity, both environmental goals within the open world and specifically designed missions treated as equally valid as the story mode moves along. Finally, the series had found combined space, movement and structure into something fully coherent, and stepped out of its own predecessors shadow to exist as a great game in its own right.
Which is what I consider to be the great victory of the series. Despite this narrative — which was there at the time — that it had been consistently declining after the 1/3rd mark, Neversoft never coasted and never stopped trying, keeping it around for almost a decade. Do not go gentle into that good night. Skate, Skate, against the dying of the light.
