With the celebrated release of the lovingly built Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2, a remake of the classic two games from 1999 and 2000 respectively, it has caused players to look in to the future about potential other remakes. But it has also made players take a retrospective look in to the past and revisit the very original Tony Hawk’s Pro skater.
There hasn’t been a decent game in the Tony Hawk series in over a decade, and that’s why the remake is even more exciting. However, the game wouldn’t be great without the source material, which was made at a time when Neversoft was on the brink of collapse and when skateboarding wasn’t as popular as it was in the early 90s, which sparked a development that sounds like a developer’s fever dream.
10 Tony Hawk Had Different Ideas About Gameplay
9 Neversoft Added The 900 After Development Was Finished
8 Tony Hawk Was More Involved Than You Think
Tony Hawk wasn’t just the face of skateboarding that Neversoft could use to shift more copies of the game. Hawk was already pursuing making a skating video game before he was approached by Neversoft, so when he did start working with the developer, he was very hands on and gave precious advice that Neversoft really needed at the time. Hawk was sent so many demos of new gameplay every day that he started giving them away to his friends.
7 The Development Team Hosted Skate Nights
6 Loads Of Mo-Cap Footage Was Abandoned
5 The Songs Aren’t Hawk’s Personal Choices
The skateboarding series is arguably better known for it’s soundtrack than for its skateboarding, as it made licensing music in videogames extremely popular and arguably started the archetype, and that’s why we have games with such care put in to what songs are selected. Many believe that these songs that have become synonymous with skate culture were selected by the skate champion himself.
However, except for one or two songs in the first game, it was the animators and other people who worked on the game that chose the punk rock music, and the re-licensing of all this music was the reason the game unfortunately didn’t have a place on the PlayStation Mini.
4 Rodney Mullen Was Planning On Retiring Before Being Asked To Be In The Game
3 Andy MacDonald’s Absence
One of the very few other skaters who could have been mentioned in the same breath as Tony Hawk is Andy MacDonald, but MacDonald was absent from the game as a playable character for no apparent reason. It didn’t make any sense as there wasn’t any bad blood between the two skaters at the time. It turned out that Neversoft was working on a part of the THPS where MacDonald was going to have his very own game mode.
As the original Pro Skater was focusing on street skating, and MacDonald is strictly a vert skater, Neversoft was crafting a mode especially to suit that, but it unfortunately never came to light. MacDonald got his very own game in the end, and though it wasn’t terrible, it definitely isn’t worth playing today.
2 The Mystery Cheat Code Women
1 The Secret Unlockable Character, Private Carrera
NEXT: Skate 4: Top 7 Features We’d Like To See
