Tony Hawk’s Pro Jackass

Ashton de Vos, Oscar Lawrence

The Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series is all about skateboarding. It’s about dropping in, grinding on rails, not giving a f**k. It serves as a love letter to skater culture. So, why, in later installments, do you play as the guy from Jackass riding a bull? 

The Golden Years

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, developed by Neversoft Entertainment, released in 1999 on the PS1, N64, and Sega Dreamcast. It met raving reviews, and a Metacritic score of 92. Tony Hawk brought skater counter-culture to the forefront and marked the beginning of skate culture getting the respect it deserved from the “serious” world. 

Its critical reception got the game into more than 100,000 households within only a couple months, exposing players to a new perspective and showing them a new way to approach life. This surge in popularity had seemingly every single corporation wanting a piece of the Tony Hawk pie, leading to collaborations with Marvel’s Spider-Man, Star Wars, and many other massive pop-culture icons. 

All that success and income allowed the developers to continue releasing new entries in the series annually, adding innovations such as a plethora of new tricks, more varied and unique environments, and even entirely new ways to play, like the BMX bike. 

At its peak, the Tony Hawk franchise was a certified cultural powerhouse. Skateboarders were getting into video games, nerds were trying out skateboarding, and Tony Hawk had cemented itself at the core of the skater persona. 

So, what happened? Why is Tony Hawk no longer the powerhouse it once was? 

I’ve got one word for it: Jackass.

Jumping the Shark: The Steve-O Problem

In 2004, Neversoft released Tony Hawk’s Underground 2. For me, this game marked the beginning of the franchise’s decline, as the series took a turn for the worse. 

Underground 2 leaned heavily into the kind of shock-value comedy associated with Jackass. While previous games told stories of skaters chasing glory and explored the essence of skate culture, the core of this game was doing as many outrageous things as possible, moral of the story be damned. 

Examples include farting on construction workers as a required part of the campaign, killing zombies with a tricycle, and skating a chainsaw. Sure, the Tony Hawk games have always had a flair for the dramatic—the plot of Underground 1 includes jumping over an airborne helicopter—but far too much of Underground 2 has very little to do with actual skateboarding. 

With how little substance there really is to this game, I’m left wondering why it’s even attached to the Tony Hawk franchise in the first place. Previous entries managed to pull off ridiculous scenarios because they remained tied to the skateboarding itself. In THUG 2, a lot of the tasks make you stop using a skateboard entirely and use some other vehicle to complete them. 

I recently just completed the game on normal difficulty and was left feeling deeply unsatisfied. Finishing it didn’t feel like I had achieved something; it felt like I had completed a checklist of random, annoying tasks. 

The campaign takes a step up in intensity from the first Tony Hawk’s Underground and turns it up another level with the “World Destruction Tour,” where players complete tasks largely centered around being a nuisance and breaking things. It was interesting for the first few minutes, and I was intrigued at the inclusion of the Jackass crew and what that might mean for the plot. 

Unfortunately, the plot itself is terrible. 

Nothing feels particularly engaging. The basic structure is: do X amount of tasks across X levels, then you’re done. There is no meaningful progression for your character other than an underwhelming stat system. Worse, the tasks themselves often feel like chores, and some are so mechanically frustrating that completing them feels more like praying to God than actually mastering the game.

Even the following game—which was not especially well regarded—gave you a sense of progression over the course of its campaign by having you develop a skate ranch and gradually unlock more ways to skate in it, including new quarterpipes and other additions. That gave the experience a sense of growth that Underground 2 was missing.

Taken together, I believe these factors explain why you simply don't hear about this franchise in the way you once did, and why it has fallen so far from grace.

How Would These Games Look If Recreated Today?

If either of the Underground games were recreated today—as the gaming rumour mill so often suggests—a lot would have to be cut simply because of how stupid and offensive some of the original material is.

For example, the first game features an Asian McDonald’s chef caricature, and it is about as bad as you would expect. It has not aged well at all. Contemporary audiences are far less accepting of overtly offensive and harmful material, and a lot of what appeared in the originals genuinely would not fly today. If some of it were included unchanged, the game would likely receive significant backlash.

A remake could probably feel and play like the original, but is it really the same game if the original Neversoft developers’ intentions are no longer being taken into consideration? So much could be lost that I would argue it might not even feel like the same game.

That is especially true if Activision or Iron Galaxy took the same route as Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4, where 4’s story mode was removed in favour of the more arcade-like structure of 3. Unless they could somehow recapture the original feel of Tony Hawk’s Underground 1 and 2, I don’t think a remake would resemble the originals closely enough to warrant being made.

Skateboarding culture has also shifted significantly since 2004. The most popular skateboarding franchise currently is skate™, which focuses heavily on realism rather than the pure chicanery that defined Tony Hawk.

How This Could Happen to Your Favourite Franchise

It seems every day a big corporation makes another stupid decision, so it isn’t too far-fetched to believe something similar could happen to your favourite franchise. 

Bungie, for example, just put one of its greatest IPs, Destiny, to bed after making several foolish decisions in succession. It’s easy to imagine other franchises suffering from the same fate if their developers or publishers make enough wrong turns. 

If a cultural powerhouse such as the Tony Hawk franchise was erased so quickly, then it could happen to anything.

Conclusion

The Tony Hawk franchise was a great one that has unfortunately fallen from grace and drifted into irrelevance. Its Jackass™-ification might not explain every mistake the series made, but it perfectly represents the larger problem: somewhere along the way, Tony Hawk stopped being primarily about skateboarding and started being about spectacle.

And once it lost sight of what made it Tony Hawk, the franchise was never quite the same.