The concept of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater is to simply make the player grow into becoming a professional at the game's complex inner-workings, making it for a truly remarkable sports title. The focused gameplay of skate tricks, combos, simple challenges, crushing but rewarding difficulty, and environment interaction make the game feel almost fully intact and can leave it being really addicting to feel the power of skating. The only drawback are that the controls can mostly be unresponsive and sometimes ruin the momentum of gameplay. The arena-designed levels of progression within the Career Campaign are excellent, taking everyday settings and making it epic skating sessions that are fully interactive, detailed, and memorable. The other modes of free skate, multiplayer, and single sessions are great for replay value. The wide selection of decks and avatars off professional skateboarders stand out with unique tricks and combos and really add variety. The sound design is great in emulating skateboards and feeling realistic, but the licensed music utilized in the game truly immerse the player and are iconic as all.

To tell the truth this isn't worth playing in current year because it's age is very obvious, but PLEASE at least just listen to the soundtrack of this game.

Makes you feel like a 10 year old kid with long brown, shaggy hair and baggy jeans with an oversized black Metallica tee sitting on your living room carpet crisscross applesauce in front of your 42 inch stark silver CRT television after a long sweaty day at the skatepark as your 5 year old black lab sits on the couch behind you and the sprinkler is on outside as your overtly attractive mom pours you a glass of ice cold lemonade and your bitch teenage sister wants to watch Friends but you're about to hit 40k on downhill jam as the sun sets outside and an orange hue permeates everything around you but all you can focus on is the satisfying sound of the skateboard grinding against a half pipe as your eyes are glued to the score counter and you pray that you can get enough points before time runs out.

You know what? Forget what I said earlier. Give it a shot at least.

The influence of the first game in the Tony Hawk series can't be understated. It's solely responsible for popularizing extreme sports games. I still remember playing it when it first released and being blown away by it.

Revisiting it in 2024, it doesn't play as well as I remembered. Skating feels a bit janky compared to later games in the series, which are known for being tight and responsive. If you have the nostalgia for the first game, it can be worth booting up for a few runs. Otherwise, I'd highly recommend the excellent THPS 1+2 remake, which basically renders this version obsolete.

The game is good, but there are better games than this game. This game is still worth playing, but only as a jumping off point to the better games. There is also a better version of this game (PS1) that’s available on more modern systems that also includes one of the better games.

Lastly…


ska

Such a fun arcade style game. I say this with a lot of games I play, but I did not expect this to be so good. I thought it would be a lot clunkier, but it has aged so well mechanics wise. I have a couple complaints, but mainly complaments.

Level design is top tier. It's just so well done and specifically made for you to have fun. Rails and ramps everywhere. The locations of each Level are all so unique as well, Skating in at a school, Skating down a Canyon, Skating in a Mall, Skating in a contest, Skating in cities, etc., all of this is so memorable and so damn fun to mess around in.

The Stuff you collect and do in the Levels only adds to the arcade fun. Collecting Letters to spell "SKATE", finding the Hidden Tape, and usually breaking or skating on a certain amount of things, as well as getting a certain amount of points. Getting anything over 25,000 points was way to hard for me, so I usually only got 4 out of the 5 Tapes. Still awesome though.

The Music just adds on to this games feel. This game really feels like a Time Capsule from the 90s. Music was some white boy punk stuff, but it amplified the Skating atmosphere so well, I really enjoyed the OST.

As I stated earlier, the Mechanics have aged great. Skating feels really great, and is just so smooth and rarely messes up, really impressive what they were able to do. Some would say it aged poorly graphically, which I guess is technically true, but I've always liked how these 3D 90s graphics look.

Some stuff didn't age as well. Sometimes it feels like you should have landed on something and you don't, sometimes going up the ramps can be a bit wonky, playing on the D-Pad isn't bad at all, but it shows it's age with the amount of moves that require you to press multiple different buttons on the D-Pad and the other Shape Buttons. None of this is all that bad, just a little frustrating at times.

Besides a couple minor complaints, this definitely lived up to the hype. Just great Arcade type fun, getting High Scores, with great music, and great collectibles. If you want a game that is actually fun unlike most of the shit they release today, give this a try, it's only like 2 hours long (if you're bad like me), so you don't have an excuse to not try it.

Score: 4.0/5
Letter Grade: A-

grew up w this series :-)) but only the later games so wanted to come back and play the early titles. skating and skate culture was literally such a big piece of my life for so long like basically the entirety of my teenage years. was cute to play this and see how the series started and how it always was just so fucking good. not much in this world has a feeling as freeing as skating and consistently so impressed w how well this series manages that tone and vibe.

hard to explain if you haven’t seen any but skate videos of the mid - late 90s just have this v specific look and vibe and it’s genuinely rlly beautiful. very hard to describe but very beautiful. original thps isn’t like as fun or freeing as later entries but it feels the most like being in a skate video if that makes sense. like it definitely has to do somewhat w how locked that camera is which unintentionally (??) recreates lots of similar shots and angles from vids of the era. idk for a couple weeks in ‘21 I was recording lots of footage from american wasteland/underground 2 and the end goal there was to edit together a music video of it set to haunted - laura les lmaoo

anyhow neversoft were cooking even in the first entry. lots of rlly sexy level design here, mall level stands the fuck out w how empty and sparse it is, very eerie in the same way rando urbex videos on youtube are. the Minneapolis level def the best in terms of how the level is constructed to best get tricks that u would see in skate videos.

cool stuff in less interesting levels too like the skate bowl w the neversoft eye inside of it or how the light blinds the camera at the very beginning of the downhill jam level when ur going up on the damn. played the remaster from the early 2010s on steam around when it originally released and didn’t like it at the time but after playing how it’s actually supposed to play and feel like I like it a lot less lmaoo. I hate being negative but damn that thing sucked sm and playing these levels was like a weird distortion of a memory. the music videos that play in select levels look so good too, big into when live action footage seeps into games actually when it’s as compressed as this. also I just spent a good while looking at some of the real life skate footage of each skater on the main menu

good soundtrack :-)) unsane is here but also jerry was a race car driver