Before Tony Hawk released garbage like Ride and his countless other cash-ins, there were quality skating games like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, which many of us waste hours and hours on after school, mindlessly breezing through each area to pull off sick tricks, collect video tapes, and snag high scores for bragging rights. This was a much simpler time, before you needed open worlds or fancy peripherals to have a good time. It was the game to play if you were an aspiring skater.
Fast-forward 13 years to 2012, where Activision has graced us with Tony Hawk Pro Skater HD, one of the closest revisions to the original game we’ve seen. It’s more than just an HD remake — it’s almost like a reimagining, and one that we’re immensely appreciative of. This is how future remakes should be handled.
Bravo to Activision for handling developmental duties to Robomodo, who from the ground up recreated the addictive gameplay we remember from Tony Hawk’s first adventure — it’s all here. From your first trip out on the board (which you can’t get off of, back to normalcy) you’re instantly transported back to a time where the grinds felt just right. A time when you didn’t have to fight with the interface, skate to missions, or contend with open-world mechanics you didn’t ask for. And those familiar tunes you rocked out to all those hours? They’re back as well — Goldfinger, Public Enemy, and more. This is, simply put, nostalgia at its finest.
You can choose from 10 different characters (and a few hidden ones here and there) and you’re still on the hunt for those elusive video tapes, except these days in our modern age we have DVDs. As a die-hard ’80s-’00s junkie, I was a little disappointed to see they had replaced the familiar VHS tapes I had collected in the original. But since it’s just a cosmetic change, I wasn’t bothered too much.
The addition of Xbox Live avatars actually softened the blow of the removal of VHS tapes for me. You can use your personal avatar as a skater, which is an interestng oddity and a pretty cool addition to the normal human skaters that area available. My avatar, grinning wide with her shiny shark teeth took some hilarious spills, and as strange as it feels to say it I felt more connected to my skater than any of the premade characters. I would have preferred to have been able to create my own skater, but the inclusion of avatars was something I wasn’t expecting.
I was very much impressed with the overall look and quality of the game as a whole, as well as the classic soundtrack — not to mention how well the controls seemed to translate to the Xbox 360 controller. It’s rare that this happens, as HD remakes seem to be in a perpetual state of flux — a few great ones, a few horrible ones here and there — it’s fantastic to see developers making an effort to improve upon and retain what we loved about the original games without making too many alterations.
While in many aspects it’s not perfect, but it still manages to capture the feeling of staying up until 3 AM in your underwear, chowing down on pizza, and staving off school the next day, where you’d likely talk about your exploits with Tony (or some other random late-’90s game) and how unfair your parents are. For ten bucks, it’s a great trip down memory lane, if nothing else.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD is available now for $15