Playing through Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4, I was reminded of two things.
Firstly, ‘Amoeba’ by Adolescents is such a banger. I went through a period of playing the original Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 where I turned off every song on the soundtrack except for ‘Amoeba’ and ‘Ace Of Spades’. That is, until my parents got sick of hearing the same two songs over and over again all day long and forced me to cut that out.
Secondly, I am straight trash at the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games. Always have been. Always will be. But because I am a man of culture, I know peak when I see it and I know peak when I play it.
Reader, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 is peak. Iron Galaxy Studios has taken the original games and combined them into one slick package that feels like a truly authentic love letter to the series. After a few hours with the new game and a chat with two of its lead developers, I’m confident this is the real deal; a celebration of one of gaming’s most beloved series.
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Like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 before it, this new collection is a smart modernisation of the 2001 and 2002 games. The soundtrack is largely as you remember it, with some new additions based on artists Tony himself is really vibing with right now. Expect old standards like Iron Maiden’s ‘2 Minutes To Midnight’ to sit alongside the likes of Fontaines DC and Idles.
Crucially, that high-score focused gameplay remains unchanged alongside those excellent original levels; a testament to the flawless design of the classic games.
City blocks and suburban neighbourhoods are transformed into playgrounds of possibilities. Guardrails and sidewalks are changed from humdrum facts of life to alluring stepping stones on the way to a delicious high score. That moreish blast of high-speed arcade action, soundtracked by some of the best punk, hip-hop, and metal you’ve ever heard — that’s all still there.
“I truly think there's still nothing that plays like a Tony Hawk game,” Kurt Tillmanns, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 director, tells me. “There's just something about when you play a game that is so well-made — when you're stringing together combos and realise that someone designed this so that it could all link together. So much thought and intention goes into it.”
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For my money, the third and fourth games in the series always had the best levels. The sinister undertones of Suburbia, the scope of San Francisco, the nooks and crannies of Alcatraz — they made the mundane marvelous and turned forbidden spaces into fantastical sandboxes.
All of these levels are back in the new collection, looking better than ever and bursting with new details only possible through greatly enhanced graphical oomph. The haunted secret garden in Suburbia crackles with moody lighting, while the fiery cauldrons of Foundry simmer and bubble expectantly. Small tweaks here and there bring the maps to life like never before.
“We sent him builds regularly,” design manager Mike Rossi tells me of Tony Hawk’s involvement with the project. “He would give feedback, and any time we talked, he seemed very happy with it — and we had been told, he’s not going to hold back!”
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“He would give us notes regularly; how tricks look, and how they're presented in the game. He wants to make sure that it's accurate to what the current skate culture is like.”
One controversial obstacle in bringing the third and fourth games together is, of course, that Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 ditched the previous games’ two-minute time limit in favour of a more open-ended approach in which you spoke to NPCs scattered around the individual maps and took on missions from there.
In favour of consistency, Iron Galaxy has opted to remove the mission structure from the THPS 4 maps and have you play through a set list of goals within a time limit, just like its predecessors. It’s a move that will definitely rankle purists, but it comes off as pretty seamless.
Tillmanns explains, “Once we put the timer in we knew, ‘This is totally going to work’. We recreated some of those classic goals that you remember [from THPS 4]; skitching the professor's car, freeing the prisoner — in this new format all of those things still work.”
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It’s also worth noting that you’re not actually limited by the two-minute timer if you don’t want to be. Leaving Free Play aside, which obviously lets you explore levels at your own pace, there are now options to let you pursue the various Career Mode goals in five minutes, 10 minutes, or even an hour if you’re so inclined.
“We want as many people to enjoy these games as possible,” Tillmanns says. “We also don't want to water it down for OG fans. These games are still easy to pick up and difficult to master, and getting to that high skill ceiling takes a long time and it takes a lot of practice.”
He continued, “We wanna welcome people into the experience right away. If you need the timer to be a little bit longer, if you want to run the game at a slower speed, if you wanna make it so that you're not going to bail, we have all of that for you.”
“There was always the ability to put on perfect balance, or perfect manual — that sort of thing,” Rossi points out of the original games. “To me that feels like it was accessibility before we called it accessibility, so we definitely thought about how we could expand that. So that's why we also added the ability to change the two-minute timer, because we recognise that not all players want that.”
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Iron Galaxy could have just remastered the games as we remembered them and called it a day. Smoother performance, better graphics, a new roster of skaters and an up-to-date and more expansive soundtrack is kind of everything you could want from a remaster, right? But the team didn’t stop there; they opted to create a few brand-new levels of their own.
Only one of these new levels, Water Park, was available during my preview, but I can tell you now it’s an absolute blast. Had Iron Galaxy not told us it was a brand-new level at the start of our session, I would have assumed I’d just forgotten it was in the original game. A bright, colorful park full of twisting slides to grind down and empty pools to drop into, it’s a joyous experience that slots right in alongside the classics as if it were always part of the family.
“It was definitely something that was brought up very early into the process,” Tillmanns says of the decision to add original levels. “We actually did have at least one playtester at one point who went through Water Park and told us afterwards that they forgot where all the goals were in the level, so they were going to go home and look it up online. That was a proud moment.”
Rossi explains: “One of the directives I set for the level design team with the new parks is: ‘This needs to feel like it was left on the cutting room floor.’ The idea that this was here all along, and was handed to us on an unmarked hard drive.”
“The first thing is really trying to think of locations that would be awesome to see,” Tillmanns adds, explaining how they settled on the themes for the new levels (most of which remain a secret). “The forbidden element of a level, to me, makes for the most iconic Tony Hawk parks. Those spaces you're not really supposed to be, those are the most fun.”
With a seamless blend of old and new ideas, alongside a studio who really seem to care about doing this series justice, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 has all the ingredients to be the big, flashy celebration we all deserve.
Topics: Tony Hawks Pro Skater, Preview