page_title: Tony Hawk's Pro Skater (video game)
section_title: Development
hierarchical_section_title: Tony Hawk's Pro Skater (video game) / Development
caption_attribution_description: Tony Hawk at the opening of the Mobash skate park in Missoula, Montana
context_page_description: Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, released as Tony Hawk's Skateboarding in the UK, Australia, New Zealand and parts of Europe, is a skateboarding video game developed by Neversoft and published by Activision. It was released for the PlayStation on September 29, 1999 and was later ported to the Nintendo 64, Game Boy Color, Dreamcast, and N-Gage.
  Tony Hawk's Pro Skater takes place in a 3-D environment permeated by an ambience of punk rock and ska music. The player takes control of a variety of famous skateboarders and must complete missions by performing skateboarding tricks and collecting objects. The game offers several modes of gameplay, including a career mode in which the player must complete objectives and evolve their character's attributes, a free-play mode in which the player may skate without any given objective, and a multi-player mode that features a number of competitive games.
  Tony Hawk's Pro Skater was met with critical acclaim for all versions but the Game Boy Color version, which had a more mixed reception. The game resulted in a successful franchise, receiving eight annualized sequels developed by Neversoft from 2000's Pro Skater 2 to 2007's Proving Ground.
context_section_description: Following the releases of Sega's Top Skater and Electronic Arts' Street Sk8er, Activision identified skateboarding-simulation games as a growing market in the gaming industry and concluded that such a title would resonate with a young audience. Preceding Neversoft's involvement in the project, the task of developing a skateboarding title for Activision was given to another studio. This studio's attempt did not impress Activision and didn't move past the concept stage. The publisher then decided to entrust the project to Neversoft, which had recently completed the third-person shooter game Apocalypse within nine months. Although Neversoft had never developed a sports video game before, the development team was confident in its ability to accomplish the task before its given deadline of the 1999 Christmas season.
  During development, the Neversoft team would spend its lunch breaks at a bowling alley near the studio, where they would play and study from Sega's Top Skater in the arcade. The game's design served as a strong basic influence, along with observances of real skaters performing in the X Games. Although the team decided that Top Skater's linearity lacked the sense of fun they aimed for, the "racetrack" element was retained in two of the game's levels. Contrary to subsequent titles in the series, Neversoft did not use existing locations as reference for the game's level design, but simply envisioned potential skating areas such as a school or a city and incorporated elements such as ramps and rails to benefit the gameplay. The team consciously prioritized fun over realism in the approach to the game's level design and physics.
  The game's engine is a modified version of that of Neversoft's previous title Apocalypse, and the game's prototype used Bruce Willis's character from that game as the player character. Once the prototype reached a functional and demonstrable state, the Neversoft team realized that they would require a professional skateboarder to aid in the remainder of production. At the time, Tony Hawk had been a popular figure within skateboarding. In September 1998, Activision established contact with Hawk and arranged a meeting between him and Neversoft. Hawk was impressed by the design team members' devotion to skateboarding, the controls and engine of their game's early build and thus agreed to lend his name and involvement to the production. Subsequently, Hawk would turn down Activision's offer of a one-time buyout for the permanent use of his name and likeness on the game in favor of a royalty deal in which Hawk would earn a percentage for every copy sold. As a result of the series' eventual success, Hawk would earn ten times Activision's initial offer within two years. On January 14, 1999, Activision publicly announced their agreement with Hawk to include him in the game. Activision senior vice president Mitch Lasky, in an interview with GameSpot, stated that the character was meant "to reflect Tony's signature style – an intense mix of acrobatics and hard-core technical skating". Hawk remarked that "[he had] always wanted to help create a video game that represented the reality and excitement of professional skateboarding".
  Hawk would spend the development time periodically playing through the game's builds and providing feedback. He would also select a group of other professional skaters to include as playable characters based on their skills, personalities and diversity; each skater received a cut of the royalties and got to select their own attire and special trick for the game. In animating the skaters, the design team largely depended on using video footage as reference. The incorporation of motion capture was attempted to aid in the realism of the animation, but due to the technology's infancy, the result was ultimately determined to have not translated as well as what had already been animated. The 900 featured in the game was itself drawn from footage of Hawk's famed performance of the feat in the X Games that summer, and was a relatively late addition as a result.
  The collection of videotape
caption: Tony Hawk, the game's namesake, in 2006
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