Played this on the Dreamcast and I swear THPS1 changed the course of history. On its own it's a really fun game, with air-tight mechanics that finally brought the momentum and flexibility of skateboarding to video games, after many failed attempts. But also THPS1 more than any other video game liberated many young minds and taught them to skate and be defiant to authority. The fun of the game embraces the outlaw nature of skateboarding, involving everything from tresspassing to prohibited spots like malls to actually busting cop cars, all to a tastefully picked soundtrack(the theme song is "Police Truck" by Dead Kennedys for god sakes). This can all feel like very milquetoast messaging coming from a multi-million publisher who today is notorious for their exploitative business practices and tax dodging, but this message lives on. It isn't so much a video game as is a poignant view into an entire philosophy. It's the real shit.

It would be outdone by future and better games for its inclusion of tricks but THPS1 has all the basics you could possibly need. If you grew up on PC versions of the THPS games as I did, then you'll feel right at home with the Dreamcast port which avoids both the short draw-distance of the PSX version, and the low fidelity of the N64.

An absolutely inspired but horribly clumsy beginning to a series which eventually gave us some of the greatest games of all time. Clearly the spark which made THPS special was there from the start, but this is a buggy clunky mess where comboing is a nightmare and the lack of manuals keeps everything short and unsatisfying.

Combine that with some tapes which are more about overcoming jank than about mastering the courses, and this is a really middling game. Maybe I'd feel differently if it never got any sequels and this was all there was to Tony Hawk games, but with the benefit of those existing, this is kind of only worth playing out of historical interest.

I THOUGHT YOU WANTED TO BE MYYYYYY FRIEND,

or at least.....some facsimile of a professional skateboarder.

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater is as delightful as it feels like the rough draft of something greater - it's the "The Little Mermaid" of arcade sports titles. It controls well, and then you remember that every single game that follows smokes it in the dust so hard that it isn't funny. It has great levels, but they feel quaint next to so many of its first and second sequel's levels that it is hard to love it as much. It crawled so that the Airport level in THPS3 could sprint.

It's so hard to view THPS in a vacuum because I didn't get around to it until years after I played THPS3, and by then it was like I'd discovered an ancient tomb of a video game. And in that tomb I found a fantastically complex and rewarding trick system, robust Dpad controls, great levels, and a rockin soundtrack that screams "crank it up dude." I also found a mild color palette, inconsistent physics, a terrible frame rate, and some good, but unmemorable level design.

I love this game, both for what it is, and for what it would lead to. And its so short that you can blast through it in an afternoon. But what an incredible afternoon that is.

The only things that sports games and fighting games have in common is that I really enjoy playing them no matter how God awful I am at pulling off combos

Copy and paste this review for every sport/fighting game I play that has over 2.5 stars

For real though, this game was the original, set the template for everything to improve over it, and will always hold a special place in my heart, no matter how bad it may look by today's standards

The only Tony Hawk that manages to take most of the good parts of skating. The only thing that keeps it away from the 5 stars are the competitions. Why should skaters compete against each other in such artificial spaces? I guess that's the "Pro" part of the title. The game is at its best when it reinterprets the mundane through the eyes of exaggerated skate. It feels liberating taking spaces such as a school or a shopping mall and making them places of self expression.

Most of the interesting qualities of the game were lost already in THPS2. While in the first game objectives were scarce and your reward were VHS tapes, the second game introduces money, both inside the levels as floating dollar bills and by completing objectives. Worse than that, that money is what makes your skater grow, while in the first game the stats just went up naturally as you played. From now on the spaces were not common mundane locations, now the skaters are touring around the world. The worst level in Tony Hawk 2 is the one on the beach where one of your objectives is doing ollies over a bum multiple times (to get money, I remind you). What happened with the game that asked you to destroy police cars instead?

Tony Hawk 3 fixes the fuck up of the money (you still gain abstract points that are money, but at least they are not literal), but keeps the tourist approach and still messes the objectives. Some of the objectives were about impressing other skaters or impressing some girls on bikini inside of a yatch. What happened to self expression? Now we skate to look cool in front of others?