Collection essentials #467: Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater (DC)

I can’t tell you a whole lot about the real-life sport of skateboarding. I do know what it entails: riding around on a skateboard, doing a variety of cool and dangerous-looking tricks. I don’t really know much at all about how professional skateboarding is organized, or how a skateboarder’s performance is formally scored.

But what I can tell you is that Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater is freakin’ awesome. And that there are an awful lot of people like me who never paid one iota of attention to skateboarding before 1999, but were nonetheless won over by a game they had no idea they wanted. This game achieved very impressive critical acclaim and popularity, garnering a whole lot of new attention to the real-world sport in the process.

There were plenty of skateboarding video games before Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. None of them were particularly great, and probably mostly appealed to people who already liked the sport. But it turns out, there was great potential all along for the sport to be made into a fun and addictive video game for practically any gamer.

What did they get right in this game? First and most important, the controls. They’re pretty easy and intuitive to understand, and very responsive. Your skater moves forward with momentum by default, and you can hold “down” on the d-pad to stop them. Holding the A button causes them to crouch and build up more speed (and releasing it lets them jump). The Y button is for grinding. The X and B buttons are for midair tricks. Pressing a button along with a direction of the d-pad determines which trick your skater performs. 

There are various modes in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. Most often, you have a two-minute time limit to skate around in a level, or in the case of downhill levels until you reach the bottom. In some cases, like “Single Session” mode, you will simply be trying to score as many points as possible. “Career Mode” is the main single-player mode, and there are various objects the player can try to achieve in a given two-minute run, which could be achieving certain scores, or finding things scattered across the levels, for example. Using the same trick multiple times will reduce the point value of the trick. Upon performing several tricks in a row without messing up, the skater’s “Special” meter will fill up. And when it’s full, they can perform one of their “special” tricks with two direction inputs plus a button, and they are sometimes hard to pull off, but they’re worth a lot of points. There are a variety of skaters to choose from, each of which has their own tricks and attributes. Playing through career mode unlocks more content such as more levels or more skateboards to pick from with different attributes.

There are some fun two-player modes too. My favorite is “Graffiti”, where performing a trick on a given object will paint it your color. Performing a trick on another player’s graffitied object can steal it, but the point total has to be high enough! Another fun one is “Horse” (based on the popular basketball “Horse”), where players take turns trying to beat the previous score set by the opponent, being penalized with one of the letters when they fail to do so, until somebody gets all the letters.

Playing for high scores is, of course, a very common video game objective dating back to gaming’s earliest days when most games were designed for arcades. And turns out skateboarding and “score attack” gameplay is an absolute match made in heaven. There is a very fun risk-reward mechanic at play. When you grind, for example, you have to try and keep your balance by moving your skater left and right. The longer you grind, the more points you get…but then the harder it is to keep your balance, and if you fall you miss out on all those points! You also get even more points if you perform multiple tricks before landing, so you can risk trying to pull off an air trick when jumping off the rail you’re grinding on and risk falling, or you could play it safe and simply land. It’s great gameplay that’s easy to pick up and play but challenging and rewarding to master. 

With its huge success, obviously this game went on to receive many sequels. Is there any reason to go back to the first one? Well, yes, actually. The main thing as far as I’m concerned is that the sequels introduced ways to link tricks together, making huge combos possible. That made the games more fun, no doubt, but the first game presents an interesting and unique challenge if you’re used to the sequels, since you’ll lack major gameplay elements that you’d normally rely on. You do have to approach Tony Hawk 1 differently if you want to excel, which gives it a niche. If you want to play the original, this Dreamcast version is the way to go, as it has the best visuals and audio of any version.

I remember when Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater was (at least fairly) new, and my cousins Kevin and Peter had it. I do have more memories of playing the second game, which was also on Sega Dreamcast, and I loved it. But there is a better version of the second game on a different system, so that’s a topic that will have to wait a little longer. But still, the game that started it all definitely deserves a spot in my collection.