Tony Hawk, EA Skate and the Zombie Afterlife of Skateboarding Video Games
How the history of skating games shows us what happens when counterculture gets consumed and reanimated by corporations.
In theory, there hasn’t been a better time to be a fan of skateboarding video games since the 2000s. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4, the sequel to 2020’s Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 — both refreshes of the original series’ legendary first four games1 — came out in July, while the long-awaited next entry in Electronic Arts’ Skate series is due to release in early access on Tuesday.
And yet, like most aspects of triple-A gaming right now, there’s a certain feeling that things aren’t quite right.
The Tony Hawk remakes, while nice doses of nostalgia for some of the greatest sports games ever made, ultimately do nothing to reinvigorate what has been a dying genre by wrapping decades-old mechanics and levels in a safe package and selling it back to us for $50.2 And while I haven’t played the new Skate game yet, it looks to be an empty, soulless, microtransaction-stuffed live-service platform with practically none of the authenticity that the series was originally known for.
Just take a look at the bland, hollow, Fortnite-on-wheels gameplay below:
How did we end up here — where the act of video-game skating survives, but only in an undead state?
To answer that, we have to rewind to the era when skating games actually felt authentic, track the slow fall of an over-annualized THPS and parallel rise of the more realistic EA Skate series, and then watch as both games drifted into the oblivion of failed sequels, long franchise pauses and now brand-safe emptiness. It’s the story of a skateboarding subculture that won (but lost) by becoming mainstream, and a gaming landscape now fundamentally at odds with the spirit of the sport itself.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater was not the first skateboarding video game. Examples of the genre date back to at least the mid-1980s, roughly 15 years before THPS hit shelves. But despite the previous existence of California Games, Skate or Die! and the delightfully ‘90s-named 2Xtreme, the original Tony Hawk game still hit young gamers like a bolt of lightning when it released in September 1999.3
Skating was the cool, rebellious thing for kids and teens of that era4 to do, and the game came out at a moment when the sport was hitting its cultural peak. Hawk himself had landed the first-ever 900 only a few months earlier — a breakthrough trick of such significance that you could see, in his and everyone else’s reaction, that their lives had just changed forever.
THPS had already long been in the works by then. It was originally born as a re-skin of Neversoft’s Apocalypse — a shooter that starred Bruce Willis as the main character — with the devs creating a mod to test the feel of “skating” through the game’s environment. Working on Apocalypse for Activision had saved Neversoft from bankruptcy, and the studio quickly pivoted to the development of a game centered around Hawk and a hand-picked group of professional skaters.
The small studio wanted to accurately reflect the culture of skateboarding in its selection of characters — all-timers that (in addition to Hawk) included Andrew Reynolds, Geoff Rowley, Jamie Thomas, Bob Burnquist, Chad Muska, Kareem Campbell, Bucky Lasek, Rune Glifberg and pioneering women’s skater Elissa Steamer — its tricks, its grungy art design, its legendary soundtrack and its overall punk attitude.
The gameplay was far from “realistic” — unless you think ollieing into a method grab and 50-50 grind off the roof of a school in Miami is how skating really works. But the original Tony Hawk game felt fresh because it distilled skateboarding’s energy into a fun arcade format that anyone could play. And both the critical reception and sales numbers reflected just how well Neversoft’s team nailed the spirit of the moment: THPS garnered a 92 percent rating at Metacritic, and it is the 24th-best selling game in the history of the PlayStation 1, moving 3.5 million copies — more than any other non-racing sports game in the console’s history.
Naturally, sequels would follow the original THPS.5 Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 hit shelves in September 2000, 10 days shy of a year after the first game’s release. The second game is nothing less than a masterpiece — it took everything compelling about the first and added countless quality-of-life improvements, including an expanded roster of skaters (Eric Koston! Rodney Mullen!), more equally-bitchin’ songs, a level editor and the all-important manual, a wheelie move that proved integral for stringing together high-scoring combos.
Tony Hawk 2 ended up surpassing its predecessor in many regards, including not just gameplay but also critical acclaim — Metacritic lists the PlayStation version’s rating as 98 percent, making it the third-highest rated console game in the site’s entire history. Another sequel, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3, brought the series into the PlayStation 2 era in October 2001, and with it came the addition of the revert to further extend combos — essentially doing for vert tricks what the manual had done for flips and grabs on the street. Now, combos were only limited by the skater’s balance stats and the player’s own skill, leading many to consider THPS 3 the best in the whole series.
But if you notice, the THPS games were coming out along the same yearly cadence as Madden NFL or the game for which Activision would come to be known — and in some corners, hated — Call Of Duty. Through each of the first nine entries in the mainline series, every successive THPS game came out within 333 to 406 days of the previous entry, a furious pace that left less time for innovation once the low-hanging fruit was plucked, and naturally set the series up for diminishing returns.
We can see this in the progression of critical scores for THPS games over time, with the peak of Tony Hawk 2 giving way to a long, slow slide in quality through 2007’s Tony Hawk's Proving Ground — the last mainline game from the franchise for nearly a decade:
What had started as a pure (if unrealistic) expression of skateboarding’s fun had become bloated and gimmicky, turning to a checklist of wacky “Jackass”-inspired missions and forced innovations. Players could feel the series being stretched thinner with each installment, losing the raw energy that had once made it so special.
Against this backdrop, Electronic Arts — of all companies — sensed an opportunity: If the Tony Hawk franchise had lost its way, maybe there was space for a different vision of skateboarding.
Enter EA’s Skate series in 2007, the same year the THPS series effectively ended its run with Proving Ground.
The first Skate game eschewed the top-down camera and arcade-y, button-mashing trick mechanics of Tony Hawk in favor of a low-to-the-ground view — mimicking the fish-eye camera of a real skate video — and the then-revolutionary “Flick-it” control system, under which the left analog stick controlled your body and the right stick controlled your board. Paired with the game’s slower pace and more realistic open-world environment of “San Vanelona”,6 this change in controls made players think like actual skaters, focusing on crafting realistic lines over crazy combos.
This matched the vibe of where skateboarding culture itself had headed. By the late 2000s, the bombast of the X Games was fading in popularity, and technical, authentic street skating had returned to the forefront. (2008’s Thrasher Skater of the Year went to the understated Silas Baxter-Neal,7 for instance.) And if the grimy, lo-fi energy of Skate was a correction after years of increasingly silly THPS games, the series still managed to sell more than 700,000 copies while also recording an 85 percent Metacritic grade on the PS3.
EA built on that momentum with Skate 2 — my lowkey pick for the best game of the series — and the immortal Skate 3, a fun game that drifted more toward Tony Hawk (and away from the series’ realistic roots) while also creating an infinite amount of buggy memes and insane stunt compilations.
By the early 2010s, though, the novelty of Skate’s controls and open world had begun to wear off, and larger industry forces — a pivot toward big-budget franchises and away from mid-budget experiments — had closed in. In 2013, EA shuttered the British Columbia-based Black Box studio that had developed the Skate series.
Following this, both the Tony Hawk and Skate IPs languished for years, bouncing between publisher indifference, development purgatory and outright embarrassments.
Rumors of a Skate 4 would surface, only for EA to shoot them down. Activision gave the keys of THPS to untested studio Robomodo, which proceeded to tarnish the franchise with the series’ worst-ever entries — Ride (with its unusable physical board of a controller), the completely-forgotten Shred, the mediocre-at-best Pro Skater HD remakes,8 and the nearly series-killing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5.
Only in 2020 was it announced that a new studio, Vicarious Visions, was working on a combined remake of THPS 1 and 2 that would modernize the series while bringing back the nostalgic look, feel and gameplay of the original. And, by and large, they did revive the series. THPS 1 + 2 is fun and plays like Tony Hawk games are supposed to, rather than whatever this is. Unfortunately, Vicarious Visions was promptly folded into Blizzard in 2021 — meaning they didn’t work on the next remake — but Activision’s replacement devs at Iron Galaxy used the same game engine for THPS 3 + 4, and it was competent enough at the most basic level.9
Combine that with reports that the core skating mechanics of 2025’s Skate reboot (it’s not “Skate 4”, perhaps by design) are pretty much what we had with Skate 3, and you might be wondering what all the fuss is about. Some skateboarding games are better than no skateboarding games… right?
The thing to remember about skateboarding is that it is, in large measure, about risk and progression. Tricks that never get landed, like Thomas and the Leap of Faith, are more talked-about than ones that do. Skaters who throw themselves down obstacles again and again, like Chris Joslin did at the El Toro staircase, gain as much respect for trying something insane and gnarly in the real world as they would for a perfectly choreographed and executed line at a contest.
When a 19-year-old Ryan Sheckler10 initially rolled up to this gap at a Costco parking lot, featuring a 15-foot blind drop after clearing 5½ feet over a bush and fence, it wasn’t clear he could even ollie it successfully. (He did, on his sixth try.) Two years later, something inside Sheckler still compelled him to try it again, this time with a kickflip added to increase the difficulty:
Why? It’s simple: Because he could. (Same as with Jeremy Wray when he ollied between two water towers, still maybe the sickest and most dangerous trick ever landed.)
This risk-taking spirit, however, is fundamentally at odds with the risk aversion shown by many AAA publishers these days. They would gladly greenlight a series of nostalgic, competently-made Tony Hawk remakes and an always-online, loot-boxed version of Skate that plays vaguely like the original, because there’s only monetary upside there.
But one reason why these games feel hollow is that they lack an important quality the original games possessed. Those games were true to the same feeling that causes someone to pick up a board and risk injury for the sake of doing something cool and original: Success was not guaranteed, yet they pulled it off anyway.
There are other ways in which these modern games go against the spirit of skating.
Skateboarding is a creative act of rebellion in a public space — a refusal to be told where you can or can’t ride. Today’s triple-A game publishers are the opposite: they are the system, enforcing rules designed around profit-maximization. Trying to capture skating authentically inside that corporate framework is becoming almost impossible. And while I couldn’t care less about knee-jerk complaints that the games have “gone woke” — a tired jab YouTubers hurl at every major release now — the truth is that today’s Tony Hawk entries do feel sanitized, designed to pass an HR-department review rather than channeling the messy, sometimes offensive punk energy they had in 1999.
And if skating naturally resists the concepts of the poser and the sellout, what is more anti-skater behavior than buying your gear and skill level-ups through microtransactions instead of earning/finding them the honest way, through grinding — both literally and metaphorically — over the course of hours in the game?
Finally, there’s the modern state of skating itself. Once the counterculture, it’s now in the Olympics and serves as a marketable aesthetic on social platforms like Instagram and TikTok, where its edges have been sanded down into an advertising-friendly product. When the counterculture becomes the dominant culture, it loses the thing that made it subversive. And the more corporations extract it for profits — as with the THPS remakes or the incoming Skate reboot — the more hollow it all feels.
That’s how we end up where skateboarding games are now: not exactly dead anymore, but rather like zombies, shambling forward on nostalgia and in-game purchases. Without a real willingness to fall, bail and try again anyway, all we’re really left with is an aesthetic — the look of skating without the spirit.
But at the same time, skating has always had a way of slipping past authority, even when it seems boxed in. If the big-time gaming industry can’t make something that captures the heart of skateboarding anymore, perhaps skaters themselves will — whether through indie projects like Session or Skater XL, or whatever the next unexpected bolt of lightning proves to be. Because, as Tony Hawk himself could tell you, the best tricks can come when no one thinks they’re possible.
Filed under: Skateboarding, Video Games
Amazingly, the 26th anniversary is 2 weeks from today.
Including yours truly.
To say nothing of the many, many Tony Hawk clones, which could warrant their own post.
A portmanteau of San Francisco, Vancouver and Barcelona.
Who somehow doesn’t have a Wikipedia page, despite winning SOTY.
Which have now been memory-holed with the newer, better remakes coming out in the 2020s.
Even if they awkwardly shoehorned the originally open-world concept of THPS 4 into a 2-minute timer system.
Who himself is an example of authenticity evolving in the opposite direction of skateboarding games: Once dismissed as a reality-TV kid, Sheckler is now fairly well-respected for putting out legit video parts and taking huge risks.
This might be my favorite thing you've ever written. I played countless hours of THPS in high school, but my intro to skate games started with Skate or Die on PC! (and that's a game I haven't thought about in forever!)