When Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater was released 20 years ago this week, initial projections for the game were modest. Although Sega’s Top Skater had been a hit in the arcades two years before, and there had been a couple of early hits such as 720 and Skate or Die, the idea of an in-depth skating sim was untested. Activision aimed to ship 250,000 copies and developer Neversoft just hoped there would be an opportunity to make a sequel. The game went on to sell more than 5m copies across PlayStation, Dreamcast and Nintendo 64 and its success spawned one of the most popular franchises in video game history, generating more than $1.4bn in sales.

Within days of release, it was clear players were forming a deeper relationship with the sim than either the developer or publisher had ever expected. People who’d never skated before were sharing button combinations for their favourite moves, discussing routes and arguing over which professional skateboarders were the best. Each freestyle area was designed to allow easy exploration and experimentation, and players could discover moves simply by hitting and combining buttons and seeing what happened.

The simple joy of discovering the best ways to rack up the highest combo scores, and the easy feel of gliding from ramp to rail as you tied together a medley of tailgrabs, heelflips and madonnas with nosegrinds and boardslides, had players hooked; plus, the way these terms appeared on screen meant they slipped into each player’s vocabulary. You needed to spend only a couple of hours with the game to feel like a pro.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The school level in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. Photograph: Activision

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater (THPS) was accessible, but it wasn’t shallow. In order to appeal to hardcore skaters and newcomers, Neversoft knew the game had to accurately simulate the feel, culture and aesthetic of skateboarding. Activision brought in Hawk, an experienced pro, as a figurehead for the title in late 1998, but, as an avid gamer, he was keen to add more to the project than just his name. The skate scene legend was in constant touch with the development team to ensure they stayed true to the sport.

“I would get updated game builds sent to me every week, play them extensively and give feedback,” he says. “I would provide them with video examples of specific tricks beyond doing a full day of motion capture for the basics. I also consulted with the other featured skaters in order to have a sense of democracy for what should be included, and proper names. Some of them are still upset that I went with ‘Ollie North’ instead of ‘Ollie one-foot’.”

The development team quickly became familiar with all aspects of skate culture. There were regular team visits to the arcade opposite the game’s studio as they devoted hours to playing and analysing the arcade unit that housed Sega’s Top Skater. When the team weren’t working on THPS or playing video games, they were hanging out in the backyard of studio founder Joel Jewett, who built a quarter-pipe for the designers to skate on.

“We had an awesome team,” says Scott Pease, then studio director at Neversoft, who worked on the THPS series from its first title until 2007. “Everyone was super into skateboarding, and that just bled out into the game.

“At the same time, skateboarding itself was really expressing itself as a cultural phenomenon. Kids were putting out these legendary skating videos and stamping them with their own unique style. All of these skaters had a different feel – this guy’s heavy metal, this guy’s hip-hop – so it was a super vibrant culture. We were just trying to make a video game that was true to that.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Burnside level in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. Photograph: Activision

To ensure the accessibility of the sim, the developers didn’t want to punish players for struggling to land moves. Consequently, they built in a forgiving gameplay system they named “trick slack”, which meant players could still land their tricks even if the frames in the character animation hadn’t completed when the board touched down. The subsequent trick doesn’t look as neat, but it’s better than having the player crash out and fail every few seconds – and a “sketchy landing”, as it was called in the game, is something most real-life skateboarders know all about.

“It just really helped make the game feel good,” says Pease, “and the whole idea of doing combos naturally fell out of putting the skaters in those environments and designing these levels with skate obstacles in mind. With the trick slack, the whole trick linking system started to come together.”

There’s a finite list of moves in the game but memorising and perfecting them provided an infinite number of ways to rack up combos. To progress through the game’s nine levels, players had to complete a variety of objectives, from reaching a high score and collecting S-K-A-T-E letters to finding the hidden VHS tapes stashed in hard-to-reach locations. The two-minute timeframe you had to do this in added an intensity and replayability to the games.

The popular perception of sports sims is that they lead players away from indulging in their real-life equivalents, but THPS demonstrated this wasn’t always the case. As the series grew in popularity, a new generation of skateboarders emerged, many of whom discovered the skater identity – from fashion and music to the slang – through the Pro Skater titles. Even now, players easily recall the lyrics to tracks such as Superman by ska-punk band Goldfinger, Blood Brothers by nu-metallers Papa Roach and mimic the opening riff of 96 Quite Bitter Beings by CKY. Many more have wardrobes packed with skate brands such as Element, World Industries, DC and Birdhouse.

The exhilarating rush players got from dropping into the Warehouse level for the first time could be replicated by picking up a skateboard in real life. For some fans, this realisation had a profound and lasting impact on their lives. “I know eight people from where I grew up who started skating just because of how much that game influenced them,” says 32-year-old skateboarder Christian Greenwood. “There must be thousands more of us all over the UK.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tony Hawk lent his look to the Pro Skater series but also tested the games to ensure authenticity. Photograph: Matt Stroshane/Getty Images

When skateboarder Paul Hilton studied the way characters such as Bob Burnquist, Bucky Lasek, Geoff Rowley and Andrew Reynolds moved the skateboard around their feet as they pulled off tricks in the game it helped him to replicate the moves in real life. “I remember learning how to ollie and then thinking, ‘Right, it’s time to learn kickflips.’ And because I didn’t really have much genuine exposure to the skateboarding scene, my only point of reference was the game, so I learned by copying the same method for kickflips that the game applied. I don’t think I’d have ever picked up a skateboard if it hadn’t been for those games.”

The game also helped to push skateboarding into the mainstream. At the end of the 90s, skateboarding was slowly emerging from a lull in popularity and the games helped raise awareness of the sport. “They inspired a generation of gamers to appreciate and, in many cases, try skateboarding and the culture surrounding it,” says Hawk. “It was the tipping point for skating in terms of no longer being considered an underground or ‘alternative’ sport.”

The legacy of the THPS games can still be felt. Jordan Thackeray, a 22-year-old skateboarder from Norfolk, is participating in Olympic qualifying events with the aim of competing in the Games’ inaugural skateboarding competition. Thackeray was introduced to skateboarding after his grandparents bought him a copy of THPS. He asked his mum for a skateboard shortly afterwards.

The series was influential beyond skating and helped shape careers across a variety of industries. “For many, the games came at a formative time in their lives,” says Hawk. “They picked up skating, a lasting taste in music and a sense that you don’t have to follow a stuffy career path to be successful.

“Many people have told me that the game kickstarted their career in music, sports or film-making because they saw that we – as pro skaters – had a different, more refreshing approach to life.”









