Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater has a special place in my heart. The first game felt like an induction into a secret cult, only achievable for that brief sliver of time before skateboarding as a sport, the franchise, and Tony himself all exploded into mainstream infamy. By the fourth game, it was no more than an affirmation for me that skateboarding was it. And even if I never could manage to get the deck talking myself, the fact that I could live out that fantasy in the Pro Skater games was special.
It still doesn’t seem real that we got the first two games repackaged, and it seems even more surreal that we’re getting the third and fourth games, especially after Vicarious Visions, the team behind the first pair of remakes, got folded inward into the Activision-Blizzard machine to assist with other IP.
Enter Iron Galaxy to grab the ball and run with it. Although there’s a foundation for them to build upon, I’d argue the task of remaking the fourth game, in particular, is a Herculean one. Unlike the original release, which presented its levels as open zones to explore and freely complete goals, marking a historic shift away from Tony Hawk’s, until then, emblematic two-minute run format, this remake recontextualises the game’s stages to once again frame them through that classic, time-pressured, two-minute-to-win-it lens.
There are obvious sacrifices made in terms of certain goals not making the chosen ten for any given level, however, I do feel as though the change is for the better. Being able to chew the fat with skaters like Jamie Thomas seemed novel two decades ago, but I’m not sure that “open” format would have aged as well as the game’s other core tenets have. Not only does it create uniformity that would have been lost had the game been reproduced 1:1, but it was a great opportunity for the team to curate and, to a degree, trim some of the fat its original format necessitated.
In what’ll be good news for those crying foul over the big, seismic changes to the format of Pro Skater 4, among the accessibility toggles for both games is an option to extend a run’s duration beyond the standard two minutes and up to an hour. It still won’t be the same game from twenty years ago, though it feels like a reasonable middle ground for those who want to be able to tackle goals without the time pressure, whether it’s collecting S-K-A-T-E or skitching the principal’s hijacked car as it tears up the college campus.
Read our interview with Iron Galaxy about all things Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 here.
All in all, I think this newer, truncated Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 experience remains a worthwhile experience. Outside of the obvious changes, I’d harboured concerns that the stages, being originally designed for open exploration, might be too big and daunting to make shorter runs viable. Of the maps I tried, College and Alcatraz are certainly on the bigger end of the scale; however, thanks to the helpful shortcuts, which were present in the original release, getting around is snappier than I’d imagined. Even Waterpark, one of Iron Galaxy’s original contributions to the remake, feels like a triumph of level design and wouldn’t have been out of place in the original release.
For obvious reasons, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 didn’t require the same extensive overhaul as its sequel. I didn’t quite anticipate the nostalgia I’d feel toward this title, and with its first two levels in particular. Like a core memory flooding back to me, I remembered receiving this game for Christmas. Santa Claus, bless him, didn’t drop off a memory card to complement the console he’d bought me, and as a result, I became very familiar with Foundry and Canada, playing them on repeat for about a week.
I felt all of the muscle memory set in as I tore up the factory setting, sending the foreman for a bath and grinding the molten bucket like it was old times. Of course, with the old comes the new, including cash pick-ups and a couple of altered goals—you’ll no longer need to 50-50 grind T.C’s rail, it has been dropped in favour of ripping out an Indy over the half-pipe. It doesn’t feel like it’s lesser than due to the changes; for the most part, they’re inconsequential. All that matters is that the ‘Tony Hawk feel’ remains, and it does.
These remakes are so authentic to the absurd, arcade feel the series has carried with it for so long. Ideas that were bespoke to Pro Skater 4 and perhaps felt more like a gimmick than a tool with any practical application, specifically ‘skitching’, have been rebuilt entirely and now have a bunch of exciting uses concerning combo-building and combo-extending. It’s not something they had to do, but it shows their genuine care in making the best Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 they could make, and sometimes that means chucking something out and starting over.
Iron Galaxy has been fortunate to have the bones of Vicarious Visions’ remakes to build upon, it’s led to a duology of remakes that feel consistent with one another. Not only that, but they celebrate a milestone quadrilogy that put so many pro skaters on the map. The very fact that the developers can pile eight new skaters, including Melbourne’s own Shane O’Neill, into these games, on top of its original roster of legends, could be seen, in part, as a testament to the importance of Pro Skater itself.
In these games, retreating to the safety net of iteration leads to a diminishing return on points. I feel that, as a franchise, Tony Hawk has never relied on having to carve the same old lines. For better or worse, you’ll always get a new concept or a new point of view.
Just as Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 served as a warm reminder that the franchise’s beginnings were iconic and, thanks to a little spit shine, evergreen. I’d argue that this collection stresses the point that not only did Pro Skater exist beyond the first two games, which have always received the most love, but that it was debatably at its most bold here.
The cheapest copy of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 is $74 with free shipping on Amazon.
