Is School III Real?
A secret Park in the Tony Hawk remaster?
This article started as a focus on two levels in the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 game, but it changed very quickly…
Sorry… I’m just a little tired. The summer seems like its lasting forever. It’s been horrifically hot. My work hasn’t changed very much, and the words have been harder to come by lately. But this… kind of messed with my head a little bit.
Background is probably the best place to start: I have a backlog of games that I have been working through. The Tony Hawk remasters seemed like an awesome game to knock off the list. I started it on Friday, July 2nd. I moved through the game pretty quickly to be honest. Gathering tapes, earning high scores. Getting a good rhythm in the game took awhile… The self-contained levels like Skate Park and Warehouse are easy to master. Points rack up due to the stage design . Other more open-ended levels like School and Mall are a little tougher to pick up on.
Schools (subtitle)
I originally was going to write about the two School levels in the games. The lawns, small buildings, and picnic tables. Secret Tapes on rooftops, a library, even some bleachers. Pretty cool levels. They feel like peak Pro Skater. The setting makes sense, and likely spoke to us when we were children. We knew schools, even if ours (probably) didn’t look like this.
The two School levels feel similar, but have major differences throughout. For starters, School II seems to be a community college. School I has bridges and lunch tables, School II has the pool area and the world’s worst go-cart driver.
This article had a decent start, but as I explored both levels, I realized that there wasn’t enough meat there. Comparing the two levels is fine, but I didn’t know if I could get the words.
School III
That changed when I discovered School III. I was fooling around School II, having some fun. Liz had gone to bed and it was late. It was the kind of late where my mind was weak and my eyelids had grown very heavy. (or was it School I? which game had I been in?)
I had just botched a simple trick when I saw a door. There was nothing special about it. Just a door on the outside of a facility, but it was different.
For starters, the door was opening up. I couldn’t see anything behind it save for a wall of black. I knew that it wouldn’t make sense to build something on the other side of the door, especially because I knew it was just a level transition.
I sat up and snapped a couple of screenshots with the PS5 screenshot option. I figured I had found a secret! I knew that this game had plenty of those. They were the kind of secrets that I was far too lazy to hunt down, but this time I had clearly done something right. I piloted Tony through the door and I was greeted with a load screen.
I picked up my phone to do a quick Google search on School secrets (School secrets, student secrets ha) when the level loaded. Tony kicked off and I realized I had discovered a new level.
I paused only to discover that the pause screen was empty of most of its normal option. The stage name was still there though: it read School III.
This woke me up. I had no idea this was a thing! A new level! Would this level be available after my time ran out? Did it have its own objectives? The pause screen had nothing. I figured that it would unlock later. Why would the developers create a secret level (School III, school secrets!) that you couldn’t get back to?
I unpaused and got to exploring. The buildings looked similar to the other Schools, but things were creepier than before. The same 2000 era music played, and it seemed quieter somehow. The sound of skateboard wheels seemed louder than usual, always distracting. I saw railings and lockers, with color palette switches that made them stand out. Posters of walls were pixelated, but some words stood out. Class, lunch, and most disturbingly, ritual. This was my first moment of unease. I had started excited, but my sleep-addled mind had turned that dopamine hit into something else.
I remember wiping my sweaty hands on my shorts, but it didn’t help. The sun was bright, and birds flew above School III. Their calls reminded me of vultures, though these levels didn’t have vultures in them. I saw a table with empty trays on it. Parts of the pavement was cracked, which I suppose was a good detail. Windows on nearby windows were cracked, and yellow light shone through. It reminded me of weird car headlights, street lamps, a bulb burning out…
My time was ticking down. I saw a ramp and headed for it. I’ll thought I could do some tricks. That’s when I saw movement on the other side of the level, and the sound of skateboard wheels on digital pavement doubled.
It was another skater. He moved quickly from behind a school building with a sign that read Meat Hall. I fumbled to take a screenshot, whispering to myself the entire time. The skateboarder was headed toward my character. I pressed down to stop Tony. The other skateboarder was abnormally tall and skinny. He looked like a bad render, a character model that had been left to die. He veered toward the screen and I was frightened in real life. The character’s face was a hard blur, but not from speed. The character flickered and the music rose and
The level was over. The game loaded and I was back at the main screen. I remember gasping for air in the stale darkness of my living room. School III was wrong. I knew that it didn’t belong, and that it was some kind of hack or mutant code. It had to be.
I looked everywhere. Through both remastered titles. No School III. I went to Google, but could find nothing about such a level. No Reddit post, no IGN secrets page. I hard closed Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2 and went to screenshots. Nothing I took had saved. I had trophy captures, but no proof that School III existed.
The Question
I uninstalled the game. I suddenly had no interest in playing it, no interest at all. There was something in that level that disturbed me. On the surface, everything seemed fine. A new look for a familiar level, a skater there to greet me. But the way his face looked…
My plead to my Game Loot readers. Have you seen School III? Do you have videos or screenshots? I’ll keep looking — at least while I write this — because I don’t want to think about the other possibility. Was I dreaming? Was the level real?
Or is it something else?
