PlayStation 1
Released in 1999 by Activision
Grade: A-
The first Tony Hawk game is a surefire fun time, with exciting gameplay that’s easy to learn and rewarding over the long haul. The mission-based career mode is well-designed for increasing challenges, and you could do “free skate” for hours on end, exploring stages and coming up with new ways to string together slick skateboard moves.
Where it falls in the series
It’s hard to overstate the popularity of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. It received great reviews and sold millions of copies to gamers of all kinds. It began a franchise that has 16 editions to date. It was released at just the right time, when extreme sports were as popular as they’ve ever been. It’s not crazy to say that the game inspired people to get onto a real skateboard for the first time.
The sequel, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2, is often called the best in the series, with a few new gameplay mechanics and bigger, better levels. There are four editions on PS1, but the focus went to the next gen starting with Tony Hawk 3. The early versions also appeared on Nintendo 64 and Sega Dreamcast, but I’d actually recommend going with the PS1 versions, where the controller is just right for the gameplay and the graphics are almost the same.
The first three games get most of the acclaim for the series. Later versions added more challenging gameplay, elaborate story modes, skaters getting off their boards, downhill races, and other stuff that strayed further from the winning formula of the early versions.
Praises
Tony Hawk turns the difficult act of skateboarding into child’s play. I’m not sure if gamers realized they were playing the NBA Jam of skateboarding, with superhuman skaters defying physics. No skater will ever be able to recreate these moves, where you can routinely ollie up flights of stairs, soar 30 feet out of half-pipes, grind multiple rails in succession, and land safely off of two-story buildings.
The control scheme is brilliantly simple. You hold X to accelerate and just let go to ollie into the air, then use Square to flip the board or Circle to grab it. You can easily rotate with the D-pad or the shoulder buttons. Triangle is used to grind rails and ledges, you balance yourself with the D-pad, and it’s no trouble popping out of a grind for more tricks, back into a grind, and on and on it goes.
As long as you finish your trick and point yourself forward before hitting the ground, you’re good. Otherwise, you’ll crash violently … and then pop right up like nothing happened.
In the career mode, you take one of 13 real-life skaters through the game’s eight levels, each with a unique design and theme. In each level, you have a few missions, such as collecting five letters floating around, finding the “secret tape,” and simply racking up a ton of points. This occurs in 2-minute rounds, but you don’t need to accomplish everything at once. The game is forgiving: you have unlimited tries, and most tasks are easy. The levels have a nice variety. Some have more pipes, some have more rails, some are crowded, others are spread out, and a couple are less “open-world” and go more end-to-end.
If you think this is sounding less like a sports game and more toward the action/adventure genre, well, you’re pretty much right. I have great respect for the athleticism, skill, and courage skateboarding requires, but I don’t call it a sport. It’s more like a highly kinetic art that is scored subjectively, like figure skating.
But whatever you call it, the fact is that Tony Hawk lets you control a guy zipping around at blazing speeds with responsive, well-tuned controls, and the sense of motion puts most sports games to shame. Tony Hawk may be hyper-realistic, but the physics are consistent within the game’s fantasy world. It’s intuitive to play, and you quickly get a feel for whether you’ll be able to jump over a certain gap or finish a certain trick before hitting the ground. The level designs keep you moving along and provide ample opportunity for tricks. You almost never get stuck in an awkward place.
Even on a technical level this game is ahead of its time. The graphics are wonderful, with environments that give a real feeling of open space and light-speed animations that don’t skip a beat. I like how the camera seems to always be in the right spot. The sounds are spot on, with realistic sound effects and a soundtrack of upbeat rock and punk songs that fit the vibe.
There were skating games before and skating games after that aren’t nearly as good. In fact, a handful of games depicting other extreme sports, like surfing and BMX biking, were made due to the success of Tony Hawk.
Developers of sports games take years overhauling their games to arrive at a quality product, yet this game totally kicks ass on its first try! Sure, Tony Hawk 2 is better, but not that much better. It’s basically a souped up version of this. And if it never existed, the first Tony Hawk would still be talked about today.
If there’s a complaint to be made, it’s that the action is so fast and so wild that you miss out on the gritty charm of skating. Simply clearing a staircase or hitting a rail just right aren’t what this game is all about. In real life, learning a kickflip is a project that can take months and perhaps a few injuries. In Tony Hawk, it’s a three-button combo that you can almost never screw up. If a more grounded take on skateboarding is appealing to you, check out Thrasher Skate and Destroy.
The other obvious knock is that this game pales in comparison to Tony Hawk 2, which plays the same but gives you more tricks, more levels, more accomplishments, more secrets, and is basically the perfect skateboarding video game. By comparison, Tony Hawk 1’s fun doesn’t last nearly as long. But I’ll be damned if it’s not a classic that’s still a blast to play today.