I’m going to try something slightly different with this one: I’m going to post the script under the cut. There are a few changes - a bunch of complaining about how stupid things got was cut because it got a little too skeleton-y without an egregious enough reason, and a few other minor differences where things flowed better/ran long. But people have asked for these before, and I figure this works as well as any other way to get them out to people.

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Skateboarding, like other extreme sports, makes for some really interesting videogames. I mean, most popular sports are interpreted via the lens of television production. In a way sports games try to emulate watching Football or watching Basketball just as much if not more than emulating actually playing them. But skateboarding isn’t really televised outside of the X-Games, and as a result developers have focused on the actual act of skateboarding rather than how it’s presented. Each new attempt is basically a new type of platformer - they redefine what it means to move through a space in the same way Portal or Mirror’s Edge do.

While there were skating games before Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, they often felt segmented or presented an incomplete picture of the sport. California Games packaged halfpipe skateboarding in with the likes of surfing, frisbee, and hackey sack. Skate or Die was focused exclusively on skating, but still had really modal gameplay that broke up half pipes and street skating. And other games that made use of skateboards tended to be generic platformers like Adventure Island or Bart Vs. the Space Mutants where it was treated more like a powerup than a set of mechanics in its own right.

But it was Tony Hawk Pro Skater that was the first really successful attempt to encapsulate skateboarding holistically. It didn’t segment vertical skateboard tricks from or street skating or present skating as a cute minigame; instead it tried to create a complete system that emulated all aspects of skateboarding.

Ironically its closest modern analog isn’t actually any of the other Tony Hawk games, but EA’s skate. At first that sounds a little counter-intuitive - Tony Hawk is very arcadey and skate is rather technical and (at least in some ways) more realistic. But much like skate, the original Tony Hawk was very much about finding lines and positioning yourself to take advantage of them. This is before the series introduced manuals or reverts or any other way of keeping your combo aloft once you were back on solid ground. Once you had landed a grind or vert trick, that’s it - combo’s over. The result was that you had to know the paths through the level that you keep comboing without dropping to the ground. Sure, anyone could go up a half-pipe and do a kickflip or two, but being able to fly over a ramp while doing tricks, land on a grind rail, then jump off of that down into another rail to finish was how you really got big points. Knowing the levels - and knowing how to trace a line through them for the most points - was the most important part of the game. It’s why the the first Tony Hawk has downhill slope levels that were dropped in subsequent games - the original Tony Hawk really emphasized finding lines through space rather than exploration in all directions. In a way shoving the player down a tube made more sense than asking them to find lines in big open level.

But with the arrival of THPS2 came the introduction of manuals - and the series began its life long obsession with mega-huge player-created combos as a core gameplay conceit. THPS1 had combos, but they were more about measuring the length of a line or the complexity of a specific grind or vert trick. It was a scoring system designed to give the guy who pulled of two kickflips and a 180 melon more points than the guy who did a simple kickflip. But with the advent of manuals it really became about chaining entire lines together rather rather than just measuring the complexity of a single trick or single line.

In the first game you had to find the ramps that gave you the biggest air and you had to know grind rails that had long lines to maximize your score. But with manuals you could string together grind rails at different parts of the map or finish a grind with a half-pipe trick. Players were still strongly tied to the limitations of the level layouts, but now you could do things like find a couple of okay grind rails, chain them together with manuals, and make one *awesome* line that the level designers never explicitly intended. This minor mechanical change heralded a huge shift in the game’s priorities from directing players through engineered lines to letting them make their own.

This push towards exploration and giving players the ability to sculpt their own paths through the gamespace was continued through to Tony Hawk 3, which introduced reverts as a method of keeping combos active after going up a halfpipe. After this mechanic, just about any action could continue a combo. Manuals let you string grinds up into halfpipe tricks, and reverts meant that you could continue the combo once you came back down. This had the effect of freeing up the player to make crazy and inventive combos, but even further reduced the importance knowing a level’s lines. At this point positioning in a level almost didn’t matter unless you were going for the highest of high scores. Some areas were better than others for maximizing combo potential, but even in areas where there weren’t as many possibilities you could still manual and revert your way through in one single unending combo.

The result was a system that felt like it had all the tools it needed to fully allow for both exploration *and* high score based competition. Arguably, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 was the high water mark for the franchise - at least mechanically speaking. This represented Tony Hawk’s mechanics both at their most fully formed and given the titles to come, also their most pure. Just about every mechanic existed for a reason; they all tied together into a cohesive singular whole. Different mechanics were emphasized by a variety of goals, and the open nature of the game’s levels meant you were always stressing different parts of the system. You know how a song can sound under produced if it’s overly simplistic or mixed poorly and it can sound overly produced if it has too many concurrent tracks and effects and cute edits? This feels like the videogame equivalent of a system hitting that sweet spot where there wasn’t really anything missing or anything that could be cut away. Any fewer movement and chaining mechanics and you’re back at tracing level designer made lines. And it’s hard to think of any additional mechanics that would benefit the system. I would posit that Tony Hawk 3 is, at least from a raw systems perspective, the aesthetically complete vision of what the series had turned into. But aesthetically complete or not the franchise was making a ton of money, and Activision being Activision had to run this thing into the ground! And so we arrive at Tony Hawk 4 - which serves as a pivotal turning point in the franchise in a lot of ways.

First of all, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4 is actually the best the game ever felt - THPS3 may have had the most cohesive mechanic set, but THPS4 refined those mechanics into precision instruments of player expression. Balance meter speeds, grinding rail stickiness, and player animations were all carefully tuned to feel responsive and tight the way Super Meat Boy or Doom feel.

But as wonderfully slick as it felt in your hands, it was also clear they were out of meaningful places to take the core gameplay. Perhaps the most useful of all of the newly minted mechanics were spine transfers that allowed players to go up one side of a ramp and down the other. And while that’s sort of useful for those who prefer a lot of vertical tricks, I’d argue it really helped level designers out more than players. They could now place halfpipes back to back in small areas to maximize vertical play or ensure that certain scripted big air transfers could land you in just the right place regardless of what the physics engine might otherwise have said.

But then there are the less successful additions… Neversoft gave players the ability to skitch on the back of cars, which was kinda cool but not particularly useful - I mean it gave no more speed than a decent halfpipe drop. The fourth game also introduced flatland tricks, but because manuals and reverts had empowered the player to make lines wherever they want it was incredibly rare to find yourself stuck in a barren area that forced you to use them. In fact, both Sketchin’ and flatland tricks were so separated from the main mechanics they had to introduce missions specifically to force players to use them. I’m not saying flatland tricks - or even sketchin’ - aren’t a part of the grander skateboarding expeirence or that they shouldn’t be put in a skateboarding game, but I am saying that their implementation in this game with this emphasis on combos and lines and exploration feels tacked on and supplementary.

These problems were compounded by the new open world approach to goals. Tony Hawk had always encouraged players to attack whatever objectives interested them, but it did so by giving players a laundry list and a two minute timer. In Tony Hawk 3 players could try and get high score objectives while grinding the required rails for other objectives while collecting the SKATE letters for still others. Once you knew the levels runs in Tony Hawk became timed challenges to see how much of the level you could beat in a single two minute heat. And because there were only nine or so levels total, it was effectively an hour long game for each skater meant to be played over and over again to unlock additional characters or levels.

But Tony Hawk 4’s open world removed the timer and didn’t start missions until you manually selected them. Much like Grand Theft Auto, the open world was basically turned into a level select tool. And once you started a mission you were given only a fraction of the play area to complete just one specific task. In effect, the levels in Tony Hawk 4 and later are actually much smaller in terms of actual play area, and breaking the missions out into discreet gameplay chunks made each mission modal and separate. In effect skateboarding games were back to Skate or Die, with some levels requiring half pipe play, some requiring manuals, some all about big combos, and others about landing specific tricks. Old games required you to mix all modes of play to complete as many objectives as possible, but later Tony Hawk games try to force one play style on you one mission at a time. And the result is that all of that elegant interplay of movement mechanics doesn’t matter.

But Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4 also signalled the arrival of something else to the formula. Let’s back up a bit. Activision and Neversoft always cribbed from popular culture in their attempts to create the Tony Hawk brand. Whether it was the soundtrack selection or pro skaters or promotional tie-ins, there was an attempt to pull as much from contemporary popular skater culture as they could. And part of that culture was a trend of recording your sickest stunts or most awesome bails. It’s why the early objectives in Tony Hawk were called tapes, and why professional versions of skater videos were included with the games, and why Skate uses a low angle fisheye lens that emulates the look of these videos. But because handheld cameras were so prevalent in skater culture there was a habit of recording not only their best skate stuff but any other stupid or hilarious things they did too - for example, the CKY videos. Now this was pre-YouTube - the market for clips of people doing idiotic or offensive things was there but had no outlet, so when this stuff came along it really took off. And so when Activision went to make Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4, there was one cultural force that had come to not only dominate the skater scene but had blown up into a cultural force in its own right.

 

That’s right - it’s 2002 and America’s got Jackass fever! Now, the game had always had some amount of this snarky irreverence floating in its DNA as evidenced by stuff like having to dunk a stuffy foreman into some water or impress Neversoft Babes in Tony Hawk 3. But with Tony Hawk 4 you see the series beginning to slip from tongue in cheek comedy to outright dudebra idiocy and assholish creepiness. I mean, in London a very American pimp will ask you if you want to bet on a chick fight between two of his hookers for ingame cash as a minigame. And elephant poop jokes! Who doesn’t love a good elephant poop joke? And a football team where every player is number sixty nine? Gosh, they know that’s the name of a sex act, right?!

After Tony Hawk 4 the series would fluctuate on just how offensive and stupid it wanted to be, but it was pretty much always offensive and stupid to some degree from here on out. THUG 1 had an asian detective who, after doing some investigatory work for him, had me delivery dry cleaning to his customers… because… casual racism is funny, I guess? THUG 2 had cameos by the Jackass crew complete with crotch shots and wanton destruction. American Wasteland ???. Project 8 had Jason Lee doing… whatever the hell this is - and then this lovingly created character:

Because if there’s one thing videogames don’t do enough of it’s ostracize women and gay people. Much like Duke Nukem Forever I’m amazed how little criticism these games for their actual content - and I think it speaks a lot about who reviews games and what they’ve historically been expected to write about.

Regardless, I’m going to gloss over the majority of the remainder of the releases ostensibly because if I covered every game this would be a 45 minute video, but also because while they each try to do slightly different things, they all suffer the same fundamental problem - they didn’t want to move away from the combo system established in the series’ heyday, but they didn’t know what to add to it, either. I’ll put it this way - Tony Hawk Underground had on-foot stealth sections and car racing sections. In a skateboarding game. About chaining combos for high scores. The well had truly run dry at this point, and we had four more of these things to go. By the very next game, this happened

Ultimately the Tony Hawk games were killed by the same short-sighted Activision business strategy of annual monetization that killed Guitar Hero and will some day claim the Call of Duty franchise. A Tony Hawk game came out on home consoles every year between 1999 and 2007, and eventually people started feeling burnt out spending $60 for content packs for the same mechanics every 12 months, especially as those mechanics became more unfocused. Aside from a few stillborn titles like Ride the franchise has been more or less dead for the past five years - which is why people were excited when Tony Hawk HD was announced.

No open world schtick, no awkward board peripheral gimmicks, minimal Jackass stupidity, no stealth sections or diving minigames or pimps selling ho fights - just two minutes to tear up some awesome lines on your skateboard. The game was returning to its roots, which, no matter how wacky and stupid the rest of the franchise got were always really strong. And what followed was a lesson in how game feel is critically important.

Tony Hawk Pro Skater HD feels slower - the trick animations take longer to complete, rotations are slower, and jumps aren’t as high. The whole thing just feels you’re moving through molasses and that the player is crazy heavy. I don’t know if this is to make the mechanics more retro like the games the levels came from, or to tone down how insane the gameplay got later in the series’ life, or to try to frame it at least somewhat realistic in order to compete with skate. But whatever the reason, I’m not sure the result works - it doesn’t feel as kinaesthetically pleasing to play as titles even just one or two games ago. The old school feel and the return of downhill levels does imply that they want players to focus on hitting prebuilt lines with minimal exploration, but at this point in the series that feels largely antithetical to why people play Tony Hawk games.

Then there are all the little things about game feel that hurt the experience. The fact that you ragdoll and go flying means the camera often needs to teleport around after a bail, which is disorienting - and worse in a game with only two minutes on the clock, time consuming. The “big drops” mechanic makes a comeback, punishing players by forcing a bail if they fall from a large height - which is particularly obnoxious in the LA level. And in the airport level there’s an grindable route through the X-ray conveyor belt that lets you through to the helicopter in Tony Hawk 3, but in Tony Hawk HD the the collision physics prevent it. Even the simple addition of reverts in the DLC feel all wrong - in Tony Hawk 3 you got a satisfying scrape noise Here it’s so quiet that you’re not even sure you did it unless you’re watching your combo text. All of these are examples of the game’s systems no longer empowering the player to express themselves in a traversal of the game’s spaces, but instead putting up barriers that make expression more difficult. Which is fine! Hard games aren’t bad! That’s basically all skate is - a really difficult to navigate system where doing simple grinds and combos is really hard, but when you do it you feel an incredible sense of accomplishment.

And perhaps that’s ultimately the problem with this clunkier, slower Tony Hawk. It doesn’t want to work with you to let you express yourself, but neither does it give you any meaningful fulfillment when you pull off the lines it’s set up for you. It’s easy enough to not be particularly rewarding, yet difficult enough to be frustrating.

Some lessons the Tony Hawk franchise teaches us are obvious - that annual releases can cause burnout for both developers and players, that appeasing your audience by putting wacky offensive monkeycheese in your game is generally a bad idea, and that having a game feel good in your hands really can make or break a game. But I think that the real lesson of the Tony Hawk franchise is that game systems can have - not always have, but can have - some sense of aesthetic completion through a cohesive system. Where if anything were to be added it would be superfluous , but if anything were to be taken away a core facet of what unified the work would be lost. Games like Tony Hawk 3, Super Hexagon, and Doom all have systems where just about every mechanic serves a purpose and they’re all important. And those systems stand in stark contrast to games like Magic The Gathering which is specifically designed to never be complete and is full of mechanical cul de sacs and dead ends, or Minecraft where mechanics get introduced by the dev team and are reconciled months later when a meaningful use for them is found. And while you can intentionally design a system that is messy, or tangled, or never truly complete for a lot of reasons, there’s a symmetry and purity of form to a game that feels whole in this way. And in a medium and an intustry so driven by iteration and sequels, I think it’s a shame we don’t recognize or applaud that sort of perfection of form when we see it.