Top 10 Tony Hawk's Pro Skater Games I Played Based On What I Remember About Them
With the release of the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4 remaster less than a week away, it occurs to me that I have played exactly ten games from this series. Not only is that an insane number of releases for a single series (and doesn't even cover every entry), but it's just enough to do a Top 10 list! So here is the definitive ranking of THPS titles which is going to be 100% accurate and unimpeachable even though most of these I haven't touched in 15-20 years.
This article is not a paid promotion, but really ought to be.
10. Tony Hawk's Underground 2 (2004)
I can understand the thought process behind this title. Here you're trying to follow up the first Tony Hawk's Underground, a game which became an instant classic upon release. How do you improve upon perfection? The answer is: you don't need to, because MTV's Jackass has become outrageously popular with the exact same demographic that the Pro Skater series is targeting. Hell, Bam Margera's been a playable skater since THPS 3. If we mash together two brands that are at the peak of their popularity, that's just going to print money, right?
And the answer is: it probably did! However, let me tell you that 16-year-old Skep's sense of humor was just as sophisticated as it is today, and I was probably the only teenage boy that didn't find Jackass's brand of bawdy, shock-based slapstick funny (I was more of a Celebrity Deathmatch kid myself). Recognizing that I would probably be less than impressed by this one, I rented it from Blockbuster, finished everything within the week, and then returned it. There are a lot of old games—even ones I know weren't good—where I still find myself occasionally thinking "I'd like to revist that one just to see how it compares to my memory of it." This is not one of those.
9. Tony Hawk's Project 8 (2006)
The Tony Hawk games never really survived the transition to 7th-generation consoles, with Project 8 being—by my understanding—the series's "last hurrah" before completely falling into decline. I'm struggling to remember it very well, likely as a result of it missing my formative years, but I don't think it was a bad game. Perhaps returning to a more subdued tone following the over-the-top Underground and Wasteland entries meant it was always going to have a harder time standing out. But unlike THUG 2, I would actually be very interested in revisiting this game.
(Also, it's a bit odd how the only two things I remember from this game are "they made it a lot more grounded and earnest" and "they added a mechanic where you try to break as many bones as possible")
8. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 (2000)
Sacrilige to rank this game so low? Not if you only ever owned the demo disk.
7. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater (1999)
As with THPS 2, I only ever played the demo version of this game. I didn't even own it this time; I just played it at my cousin's house for an evening. But man, tearing up Warehouse over and over, playing as Tony Hawk and Kareem Campbell, while Superman by Goldfinger plays seemingly on repeat. That's enough. In my mind, this is just the entire game, because you don't even need the rest of it.
6. Tony Hawk's American Wasteland (2005)
Look, the premise was good. Move to Los Angeles, get in with the locals by taking random cool bits of archetecture and using them to revitalize a legendary skate park? Too bad the "skate utopia" kinda sucked ass to play in after you built it all up. Still, the game introduced me to Scissor Sisters, so it wasn't all bad.
5. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 (2001)
I bought this for PC. Funny thing is, I was too young to understand how system requirements worked. That's not to say this game played poorly on my computer; I actually remember it running very smoothly. But, for whatever reason... the game just refused to load any textures whatsoever. So the entire game to me was just textureless shapes, most of which were either white, light gray, or some other washed-out color. I didn't understand, but I also kind of didn't care? Really, the biggest downside was that some of the objectives relied on featureless shapes that visually blended into the other featureless shapes around them. Still, I played the heck out of this one.
Also, THPS 4 gets the credit for inventing flatland transitions, but actually, THPS 3 had them too. They were not easy or intuitive to pull off, and I don't remember them being hinted at anywhere, so I don't remember how exactly I found them. But since I also had perfect balance cheats enabled, super-easy way to cheese the game (don't yell at me, I didn't like the timed runs back then).
Anyway, it's going to be a real trip when I inevitably end up buying the 3 + 4 remaster and finally get to see what these levels were actually supposed to look like.
4. Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX (2000)
"Skep, this isn't a Tony Hawk game." Of course it isn't, it's better than a Tony Hawk game.
Sure, handling a bike in this game is like trying to jump a quarter pipe in a station wagon, but man is the trick system so much more rewarding. Look, you got your basic bike tricks: backflip, tailspin, superman, things like that. Your bread-and-butter stuff. But then you have a selection of modifiers and combinations that provide so many different variations on your standard moveset. You could turn your backflip into a no-handed backflip. Or combine it with the superman, you've got yourself a superflip. This is the kind of stuff that Pro Skater would only hand out as special moves sometimes. But not here; you can bust these tricks out whenever. And you would need to when the back half of the game turned into competitions.
Also, funny story, this game was where I first heard Sublime's What I Got. Catchy song, I wanted it. Mom asks me what I'm downloading on Napster (really dating myself here). I'm like, here, this song is good, listen. Uhhh, what I didn't know was that the songs were heavily edited to make them fit into the 2-minute time limits for each run, and I definitely didn't know that the verse that mentions getting high and includes the line "I can play the guitar like a motherfuckin' riot" even, you know, existed. After that debacle, I wasn't brave enough to include that song in any of my playlists until about a year or two ago.
"Okay, but you said you played ten Tony Hawk games, and this isn't a Tony Hawk game, so the whole premise of this article is built on lies." Actually, I also owned the Game Boy Color version of THPS 2, but it was so awful it didn't even make the list. So piss off.
3. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2 (2020)
At the time I figured this would be the only remaster we'd be getting, so I picked it up even though I didn't actually have the greatest familiarity with these games. Solid remake! I liked that it had a lot of the mechanics introduced in the later titles so it was incredibly easy to fall back into. Plus, it was cool to not only have the old pro skaters, but also a bunch of newer names in the sport as well... none of whom I recognize because I never really followed skateboarding even when I was originally playing these games let alone now, but you know, it's still a good touch. On top of that, everyone says split-screen multiplayer is dead; but this game has it, and for a couple hours, my brother and I were kids again, dicking around in Pro Skater like we'd done so often in the past. Really, why am I not being paid for this article?
2. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 (2002)
Man, this game. "Don't worry about the 2-minute time limits anymore, skate around the huge levels and complete challenges at your leisure." Don't mind if I do. There was so much variety in objectives, and every single level was a certified banger—although to date, Alcatraz still can't be beat as the absolute best level in the series, and you won't change my mind. This was also the game where we got moves like reverts and spine transfers to keep our combos flowing. Yes, the levels were bigger now, but you could still go from one end to the other in a single trick. And, very frequently, you had to for challenges. Oh, and the soundtrack introduced me to Flogging Molly.
1. Tony Hawk's Underground (2003)
You have to understand, this was the awkward era in which video were starting to make themselves "edgier" in an attempt to seem more mature. Given that the Pro Skater series—which was most appealing to the teenage boy demographic and was already rooted in counterculture—this was a natural direction for the series to go. The games had been growing progressively sillier and less mature with each subsequent release, starting with unlockable joke skaters in 1 and 2, to humorous challenges and dialogue in 3, to a minigame in 4 where you had to dodge poop thrown at you by monkeys. I don't think anybody would argue this lightheartedness should go away entirely—and in 4's case was probably needed to keep the large number of challenges from feeling stale—but some sort of reset makes sense if you want to keep things from spiraling into Conker's Bad Fur Day (nobody wants another Conker's Bad Fur Day).
In this era, we saw so many franchises that failed to pull off this transition successfully, completely transforming what they used to be into something jarringly grim and gritty. But Tony Hawk's Underground... didn't. It kept things light and fun (the line "do a smith grind!" will live rent-free in my head forever), but it dialed back the sheer goofiness and focused on telling a genuine story. A local skater going pro and rising through the ranks despite their so-called "friend" sabotaging them at every turn, taking a big risk that pays off in a bigger way, falling from grace after one final betrayal, and getting back on the board after remembering that it was never about the money and fame... it was about the love of skateboarding. It's not deep stuff, but it is a signifier of the series taking itself more seriously. It was the perfect entry at the perfect time, and that's why it won't be topped.
...And then right after this they did a complete 180 and went full Conker with Underground 2. Uuuugh, guys. Just because you can't outdo your previous work doesn't mean you have to nosedive the plane into the ground.