THE HISTORY OF TONY HAWK’S PRO SKATER
Have you seen Tony Hawk recently? Not just out and about buying his groceries, but instead rocking his deck, riding a half pipe and trying to slam that infamous 900? With the helmet on and all that vertical air, it’s impossible to spot the difference between then and now, between the Birdman many of us will recognise from the late Nineties and the here-and-now 2020 version. There may be wrinkles around his eyes and silver streaks in his hair, but age hasn’t stopped this public figure from doing what people love to see him do. That’s kind of the feeling surrounding the games his name has been attached to as well, and if the excitement surrounding the release of the remasters for the original two Pro Skater games has proven anything, it’s that there’s both a great thirst for some classic Tony Hawk gaming and clear evidence that some games can age like wine, not cheese.
Of course Tony Hawk wasn’t always associated with the brand. First came Activision, a then-little-known developer called Neversoft and a PlayStation rendition of Bruce Willis. “We were working on this Big Guns game for Sony, but that got cancelled and Neversoft nearly collapsed,” says Mick West, one of the three cofounders of the studio. “The company was running out of money, we had something like 12 people on staff – but then we hooked up with Activision, and they gave us Apocalypse [a third-person shooter featuring the Die Hard star].” All that Activision wanted was a movie tie-in out for Christmas, but Neversoft did such a good job of it that Activision offered the studio some additional work on a new title. “The original concept was that Activision had decided there was a hole in the market for a skateboarding game,” Mick explains, “and so the idea was to do… a skateboarding game.” Neither Neversoft nor Activision had any real “idea of what that would actually be”, and so the team set about trying to figure out exactly what form such a game should take and what would make it fun. “So we built a prototype in the Apocalypse engine with Bruce Willis skating around on a skateboard.”
“ACTIVISION DECIDED THERE WAS A HOLE IN THE MARKET FOR A SKATEBOARDING GAME…
