THOUGHTS ON: Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4
A nice appeal to the past that I would like to see moving into the future
I know that every piece of written work that I’ve published about video games in the past ~3 years has carried this underlying theme of moving on from or growing out of the endeavor as a whole, so I understand if the fact that I bought an XBOX Series X and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 last week seems out of character. It felt somewhat out of character as I did it. I had to both justify the purchase to myself (As in ‘there will be and have been other games that have piqued my curiosity, I’ll probably be living on my own again next fall and I’ll want something to use as a cable/stream box and Blu-Ray player, might as well make this purchase now’) and disregard all justification for the purchase (as in ‘Let’s just do it on this Thursday evening in late July, even if I regret it I can return it to GameStop after the weekend’) in order for me to actually bite the bullet.
A week and a half later, I don’t regret being a Series X owner. THPS 3+4 gave me my full money’s worth and then some (‘Then some’ referring to the tendonitis that flared up in my right index finger after three days of play). I also got to try Wheel World, Gang Beasts, and Balatro through Game Pass.
My Brain is Not Wired to Two Minute Runs on the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 Levels
The THPS 1+2 reboot worked so well partially because the second game made minimal tweaks to the formula that worked well in the first. The second game added manuals between tricks, doubled the number of goals to complete in each level, and added a cash system for upgrading one’s attributes and adding new tricks. Fundamentally, both games were built around either completing goals within a two-minute time limit or getting high contest scores in a one-minute time limit, so the idea of squeezing both games into one package was sensible.
The original THPS3 and 4 are quite different games, as far as the basic career mode goes: The third still operated under the time constraints of the first two and the fourth completely eschewed that time limit.
THPS4 is a weird game, in retrospect. It’s kind of the odd duck of the franchise’s original run. Some leftover core mechanics from the first three games feel out of place in the free-roaming, waypoint-based career mode (It is funny in retrospect how each Non-Playable Character has to justify both (A) How all of the letters of the word SKATE got scattered around the level and (B) why they need you to collect them). Some core mechanics of the later games haven’t been fully cooked quite yet (The requirement to be so precise in just tracking down some of the NPCs who give the skater the goals to complete was later aided when they added the ability to get off of the board and to fast-travel to each goal).
Most of the THPS4 levels are designed around the free-skating mechanics, in that they’re much larger in scale and replete with more nooks and crannies than those of the first three games. There’s more fat on the bone in the THPS4 levels when compared to the first three games (I’m thinking specifically of that section by the football stadium in the College, the waterfront sections of San Francisco, and each animal enclosure in the Zoo), but they worked well given the more leisurely pace with which the player could approach THPS4.
For the remake, the developers at Iron Galaxy chose to adapt the two-minute format for both games’ levels, rather than imposing a major mechanical shift on the player midway through the experience.
It was very, very odd to recontextualize the levels that I’ve approached with such lackadaisy for nearly 23 years. I was 7 years old when I learned the levels of THPS4. I’ve known the locales of THPS4 for longer than I’ve known basically any of the physical locales that I navigate on a day to day basis in my adult life, and I’ve always been able to approach them at my own speed.
To start a run in the College with a fire under my ass from the start, with only two minutes to complete its goals was a completely unfamiliar experience to me, and it felt almost perverse in practice. I’d compare it to when I attended the two Kansas football games at Children’s Mercy Park last year, a stadium in which I’d seen thirteen years of soccer matches and soccer matches alone but now had to understand with downs and distances, constant whistles, and TV timeouts.
This was probably the worst at the Zoo, which was turned into the game’s final competition level. In the first three games, the competition levels were each fairly well contained, if not outright more compact than the game’s other levels, in order to be fully used in a one-minute time limit.
The Zoo was built with exactly the opposite approach in mind. The original Zoo features an multi-part (and untimed) goal in which one angers an elephant into charging through the level and destroying the doors of the aquarium, another goal in which one shoos the birds away in an aviary, and a mini-game in which the player plays tennis against an ape who flings its own refuse at them. The original Zoo is practically indulgent, and to be limited to only a single minute in the Zoo in the career mode just feels uncanny. If I hadn’t played the original THPS4, these levels would probably only feel bloated, but the time limit does not do them justice regardless.
I Would Like for Iron Galaxy to Make a Full New Game in this Series (But I don’t expect for it to happen)
The peak of my experience with THPS 3+4 came in the new Waterpark level added in the THPS4 career path. It combines the best aspects of the Cruise Ship, Alcatraz, and Shipyard levels - It feels vast, but well-populated in horizontal scope and it encourages the player to find lines on its many slides and carnival midway booths above the ground as well. It feels like (and is) a Pro Skater level built by people with twenty-plus years of experience playing and building Pro Skater levels. It was fun, and novel, even, to learn a new Pro Skater level like this. I enjoyed searching for valves to grind, signs to break, and the keys to the arcade as the timer ticked down more than I’d enjoyed simply replaying the same levels I’ve played through hundreds of times in my life.
I haven’t learned a new Pro Skater level since 2015’s THPS5, which was absolute dogwater, haven’t learned a new Pro Skater level in an even mediocre Pro Skater game since 2007’s Proving Ground, and haven’t learned a new Pro Skater level in a really good THPS game since 2005’s American Wasteland. That was twenty years ago! I was in the fifth grade! I hadn’t needed to think about
Since 2007, the Pro Skater series has seen three remakes and one flubbed reboot. That’s nearly two decades spent existing primarily in the past, as little more than a piece of early-aughts nostalgia-bait for aging late-Millennials like me. I think this series can work in the 2020s, though! The constraints of self-contained levels and two-minute goal runs can serve as an antidote to the glut of open-world single-player experiences that have become the default big-budget gaming experience. I’d be more interested in a theoretical all-new Pro Skater game than I would Tony Hawk’s Underground 1+2, for example.
I also know, unfortunate as this is, that the video game industry of 2020 operates at such thin margins that a major publisher like Activision would be very reticent to support an unsure bet like that, especially if faced against another return to the nostalgic remake well that has twice proven successful. The independent sphere has picked up a lot of the slack left here, rife with retro-style extreme sports games like Street Uni X, MotorDoom, and Mop Skater, but I think that a full-on new Pro Skater entry in this engine could still work both a quality game and a financial hit.
There’s an interesting contrast between my reaction to this entry in 2025 and my reaction to THPS 1+2 in 2020
This speaks more to my personal relationship with video games than it speaks to anything about the game itself, but I had forgotten about significant THPS 1+2 was to me. I looked back at my “Top Ten Video Games of 2020” article/video that I made that December, in which I placed THPS 1+2 at the top of the list, and most of my commentary spoke less to anything about the game itself and more to the personal sense of validation that it evoked in me. In the blog post about it, I connected the idea that this series could be good again to the idea that my life could be good again. Melodramatic as that reads now, I sincerely felt it at the time. In the video, I describe a sense of extrinsic validation that it evoked as well. That game proved, in my mind, that this series, my favorite as a child, was indeed a quality series of games, and that I wasn’t like a stupid kid because I played so much of it instead of the handful of games that defined the childhood gaming experience of others (Zelda, Pokemon, Metroid, etc.).
THPS 3+4 has not repeated that feeling in me. It is neither life-affirming nor has it brought serenity to a younger version of me. It’s not any lower in quality than THPS 1+2, it’s just that I no longer ask video games to provide that to me. On the first point, I’m in a much better place mentally than I was in September of 2020, and when I have spells of poor mental health, I’ve tended to turn to literature rather than gaming to make sense of it.
On the second point, as I’ve slowly divorced myself from much of the online discourse around gaming in the year since, the idea of feeling insecurity about what video games mattered to me as a child feels quaint now. I was upset back then about an inability to participate in conversations that I don’t care to participate in anymore. I no longer feel a need to see myself reflected in junk food YouTube videos about the best video games of the 90s or whatever. THPS 1+2 helped me to get past that, at least partially, but I’ve also changed my priorities in the past five years. I’ve grown skeptical of and averse to nostalgic tendencies, partially because of how thoroughly I leaned into them during the throes of the pandemic. I slipped back into childhood because I wasn’t happy to be living the life I was living at the time. Once I started to regain footing and learned how to make the most of life, those appeals to simpler times stopped feeling like appeals to better times.
So I’m happy to say that THPS 3+4 is simply a quality game to me, and that it hasn’t meant as much as THPS 1+2 did, as that reflects how much my life has changed for the better in the past five years.