Second script! Well, at least a portion of it... Tony Hawk's Pro Skater Is Not A Skateboarding Game

Hey again!

This is the second bit of writing I've been working on, and it's one I've had in my head for literally years now. I'm still working out a couple of the finer points, so this is just the intro for now. The rest of the piece goes deeper for sure. Essentially I became fascinated by this idea that a big reason why Tony Hawk's Pro Skater ultimately fizzled out, with that fervour around its return nonetheless still burning, is that the moves the series made towards an open world direction—the kind of freedom that seems to fall in line with skateboarding as an art, a lifestyle—fly in the face of the mechanical and design structure of Pro Skater. This piece essentially explores why Tony Hawk isn't a game about skateboarding, but rather movement, flow and efficiency. Those are distinct, and you'll see what I mean in the final piece.

Anyway, this one in particular has been really fun to write. It's similar to subjects I've touched on with this series before, just explored in a bit more depth. Especially after the MGS video though, shorter, snappier pieces like this and the CoD video have been extremely refreshing.

Once again, thank you so much for your continued support and I hope you're excited to see the full thing when it's done (hopefully) this weekend.

Thanks again,

Hamish

Writing on Games

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At the time of writing, it’s been four years since Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater rocketed back onto the scene with a ridiculously effective remake of the first two PS1 titles; three years since our hearts were broken by the news that Vicarious Visions was getting subsumed by the corporate beast of Activision to work on Call of Duty, dashing any hopes of further remakes of the beloved series. The disappointment was as palpable as the relative elation when the birdman himself let slide that, for the series’ 25th anniversary, he had been in talks with the series’ publisher to revive it somehow.

All this for a series that, for so long, had been viewed as long in the tooth. Multiple catastrophically failed attempts to bring it back following what was, even in its heyday, a dramatic decline in positive public sentiment. This series went away because people were tired of it—the series was tired.

But those early games are still considered some of the best of all time—hell, they are the best of all time. That remake of 1+2 has maybe unseated 3 as my favourite Tony Hawk game, and 3 was already maybe my favourite game.

All this to say, the yearly release cadence the game slumped into might have you thinking stagnation was the problem, as it is with so many annual franchises. In fact, the series actually changed pretty fundamentally over time—where it ended up was a lot different from where it started.

Indeed, the problem with the series, and where any future instalments or remakes or whatever will have to try and avoid tripping up is that, contrary to what most people might think, the more open Pro Skater became, the more it moved away from what made it so great in the first place. In short, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater doesn’t work as an open world game. To go even further, I don’t even really see it as a skateboarding game at all.

See, when I think of skateboarding as an art, as a lifestyle, the word that comes to mind is “freedom.” It would make sense then, that especially with the release and subsequent dominance of games like Grand Theft Auto 3, opening up the possibilities of how players approached objectives (starting with 2002’s Pro Skater 4), moving away from the seemingly restrictive two-minute time limits that previously defined the series’ arcade action, felt like a logical move. And bear in mind, this all started long before Skate came along and moved the genre in a more overtly simulative direction. But the reality of the series’ mechanical evocations goes deeper than mere “freedom,” which is important to understand to get a better picture of the series’ fall from grace.