Tony Hawk's Pro Skater
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, released as Tony Hawk's Skateboarding in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Europe, is a 1999 skateboarding video game developed by Neversoft and published by Activision. It is the first installment in the Tony Hawk's series. It was released for the PlayStation on September 29, 1999 and was later ported to the Nintendo 64, Game Boy Color, Dreamcast, and N-Gage.
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater takes place in an urban environment permeated by an ambience of punk rock and ska punk music. The player takes control of a variety of skateboarders and must complete missions by performing skateboarding tricks and collecting objects. The game offers several modes of gameplay, including a career mode in which the player must complete objectives and evolve their character's attributes, a single session, in which the player accumulates a high score within two minutes, a free skate mode in which the player may skate without any given objective, and a multiplayer mode that features a number of competitive games.
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater was met with critical acclaim for all versions except the Game Boy Color version, which had a more mixed reception. It is widely regarded as one of the greatest video games ever made, praised for its innovative gameplay, soundtrack, and influence on the skateboarding genre. The game resulted in a successful franchise, receiving eight annualized sequels developed by Neversoft from Pro Skater 2 to Proving Ground. It is also credited with introducing skateboarding to a more mainstream global audience. It received a remake along with the sequel, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2, in 2020.
Gameplay
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater puts the player in control of a skateboarder and takes place in a third-person view with a fixed camera. The goal of the game is to perform tricks and combinations thereof in an effort to increase the player's score. Movement can be altered using the d-pad or analog stick, and ollies, grabs, flips and grinds are each assigned to individual buttons. Each skateboarder has eight grabs, eight grinds and eight flips. The number of points earned from a successful trick sequence is dependent on the amount of time spent in the air, the degree of rotation, and the number and variety of tricks performed; the more a single trick is performed in a sequence, the fewer points it will earn. When the player succeeds in performing tricks, a special gauge increases. When this gauge is full and flashing, the player is capable of performing a special trick that is worth many more points than ordinary tricks. If the player bails, any points that may have been earned from the current combo are lost, and the special gauge is emptied.In the game's "Career Mode", the player must complete five objectives in each level within a period of two minutes. The player is not obligated to complete all the objectives within a single run; any completed objective is committed to the game's memory, which allows other objectives to be completed within multiple playthroughs of a level. Two common objectives in each level are achieved by accumulating two defined scores, which gradually increases in difficulty throughout the game; while one other common objective is to collect letters of the word "SKATE". Another common objective is to destroy five of a certain object within each level. The fifth objective involves collecting a VHS tape hidden in the level. Completing objectives unlocks additional levels and equipment for use. Three of the mode's levels take place in a competition setting in which the player performs for judges and accumulates the highest score within three one-minute rounds. The player receives a bronze, silver or gold medal depending on the final score they are given. Other single-player modes include the "Single Session", in which the player can freely accumulate a high score within two minutes using any previously obtained levels and characters, and the "Free Skate", in which there is no time limit imposed.
The multiplayer mode is played by two players in a split screen view and offers three games: "Graffiti", "Trick Attack", and "HORSE". In "Graffiti", players must accumulate the highest score by changing level elements into their own color via the use of tricks. If a player performs a higher-scoring trick on an element that has already been marked, the element will change to that player's color. "Trick Attack" is a mode in which players must accumulate the highest score by chaining tricks together. "HORSE" is a game that is played intermittently between two players, who must compete in rounds lasting either eight seconds or until a trick has been made. The player with the lower score on any given turn receives a letter in the word "HORSE" or whatever word the players have generated prior to the game's start. The first player to accumulate the entire word loses.
Featured pro skaters
The game features a total of ten real life professional skateboarders, along with two unlockable original characters: Officer Dick and Private Carrera.Development
Following the releases of arcade game Top Skater by Sega and PlayStation game Street Sk8er by Electronic Arts, Activision identified skateboarding-simulation games as a growing market in the gaming industry and concluded that such a game would resonate with a young audience. Preceding Neversoft's involvement in the project, the task of developing a skateboarding game for Activision was initially given to another studio. However, this studio's attempt did not impress Activision and the game did not move past the concept stage. Activision then decided to entrust the project to Neversoft, which had recently completed the third-person shooter game Apocalypse within nine months. Although Neversoft had never developed a sports video game before, the development team was confident in its ability to accomplish the task before its given deadline of the 1999 Christmas season.During development, the Neversoft team would spend their lunch breaks at a bowling alley near the studio, where they would play and subsequently study from Sega's Top Skater in the arcade. The game's design served as a strong basic influence, along with observances of real skaters performing in the X Games, which were taking place during the game's development. Although the team decided early on that Top Skaters linearity lacked the sense of fun they aimed for, the "racetrack" element was retained in two of the game's final levels. Contrary to subsequent games in the series, Neversoft did not primarily focus on using pre-existing locations as reference for the game's level design, but simply envisioned potential skating areas such as a school or a city and incorporated elements such as ramps and rails to benefit the gameplay. The team consciously prioritized fun over realism in the approach to the game's level design and physics.
The game's engine is a modified version of Neversoft's previous game Apocalypse, and the game's prototype used Bruce Willis's character from that game as the placeholder player character. Once the prototype reached a functional and demonstrable state, the Neversoft team realized that they would require a professional skateboarder to aid in the remainder of production. At the time, Tony Hawk had been a popular figure within skateboarding for quite some time. In September 1998, Activision established contact with Hawk and arranged a meeting between he and Neversoft. Hawk was quickly impressed by the design team members' devotion to skateboarding, the controls and engine of their game's early build and agreed to lend his name and involvement to the production. Subsequently, Hawk would turn down Activision's offer of a one-time buyout for the permanent use of his name and likeness on the game in favor of a royalty deal, in which Hawk would earn a percentage for every copy sold. As a result of the series' eventual success, Hawk would earn ten times Activision's initial offer within two years. By January 1999, Activision publicly announced their agreement with Hawk to include him in the game. Activision senior vice president Mitch Lasky, in an interview with GameSpot, stated that the character was "meant to reflect Tony's signature style – an intense mix of acrobatics and hard-core technical skating". Hawk remarked that " always wanted to help create a video game that represented the reality and excitement of professional skateboarding".
Hawk would spend the development time periodically playing through the game's beta builds and providing feedback, using a specially modified PlayStation console that can play games burned on CD-Rs. Hawk even went so far as to purposely send advance copies of the game to a trusted group of people who also owned modchipped PlayStations: "I had a modified PlayStation so I could use burned discs, and they'd send me new developments and we'd go back and forth. I'd let people play it, people that I trust. At one point, I felt it was getting so far along that I started to sneak out copies for those same people - these people had modded PlayStations. As subversive as that was, it started to create a buzz in the industry, because they were key players in the skating industry and they were also hardcore gamers". Hawk would also personally select a group of other professional skaters to include as playable characters based on their skills, personalities and diversity; each skater received a cut of the royalties and got to select their own attire and special tricks for the game. While animating the skaters, the design team largely depended on using available video footage as reference. The incorporation of motion capture was attempted to aid in the realism of the animation, but due to the technology's infancy, the result was ultimately determined to have not translated as well as what had already been animated. The 900 featured in the game was itself drawn from footage of Hawk's famed performance of the feat in the X Games that summer, and was a relatively late addition as a result.
The collection of VHS tapes was directly inspired by the collection of stars in Super Mario 64. In designing the objectives, the team would gather at a table, draw a level and then ask what could be done within said level, upon which the team members would provide ideas. Rejected concepts arising from these sessions include levels taking place on a highway and a jetty, and even a scenario in which the player would lose a wheel and have to skate on three wheels. Manuals were originally intended to be implemented into the game, but were omitted due to time constraints; manuals would subsequently be included in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2.