West was working with Joel Jewett to oversee the project as it became the sole property the studio was developing. “The mission statement was basically 'make a fun game about skateboarding', but the first stage was 'figure out what's fun',” Neversoft co-founder Mick West explains. “I thought it had the most intuitive controls and a lot of free roaming capabilities.” The deal was signed and the tiny team at Neversoft took the reins in the hopes they could turn this niche sport into a blockbuster franchise.
TONY HAWK PRO SKATER 2 PC PRO
“I went to Santa Monica and they showed me their very early version of what would become Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater,” Hawk recalls. To Hawk, Activision must have seemed like a last ditch attempt. Take Two reached out to Hawk and they bandied around some ideas, but it didn't click. Hawk and the PC developer parted ways after the developer became discouraged by executives who believed skating didn’t fit video games. “We went to a couple of different meetings, he had a crude engine for a game - it wasn't very involved or very exciting, but it was a start.” “A PC developer wanted to pitch a skate game to different publishers,” he explains. Hawk had already been attempting to bring a skate game into the world for years before that meeting. “We heard you're working on a game, we're working on a skate game and would like you to see what we're doing,” Hawk remembers the publisher saying at the time. A few months later, Activision released the video game, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, and the world grabbed hold of this previously fringe sport eagerly.Īctivision approached Tony Hawk the year before, in 1998. On his twelfth attempt, he kept the skateboard under his feet and made history. In front of 275,000 people, June 27, 1999, at the San Francisco X Games, Tony Hawk tried eleven times to successfully land a 900 degree spin. Tony Hawk and Neversoft tell the story of making Tony Hawk's Pro Skater first appeared on the site on April 26, 2018.
With the release of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2 this week, we're republishing our exclusive interview with Tony Hawk and the original development team at Neversoft on the making of an iconic sports game.