Tony Hawk's Pro Skater: Every Game Ranked Worst To Best
From downhill jam to an uphill battle.
Although the extremities of skateboarding were only known to those of us with a nuanced knowledge of the sport, a solid decade of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater quickly corrected that lack of mainstream attention, influencing an entire generation to pick up a board and subsequently get picked up by an ambulance.
For anyone that isn’t down with the kids - the kids of twenty-something years ago anyway - Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater was an immaculate beast of a game that flew from retail shelves in the twilight of the 1990s. After receiving an influx of momentum, it soon paved the way for extremely abysmal, endless copycats and refused to subside for the foreseeable future.
Once the rose-tinted glasses were removed around the mid-2000s and creativity wore thin, the fuel from this fire ran dry. Just as quickly as people became enamoured, so too did they become annoyed. Inevitably, a return to the glory days seemed insurmountable for some time, with the franchise’s declining slump being a precursor for a fatigue that would plague the series.
After its eventual hiatus when THPS got some well-needed respite, it’s now seeing an influx of new ideas. Across now 20 years of the Hawkster then, have the classics become archaic and are the new ones nothing but nostalgia bait?
There's only one way to find out.
16. Motion
If released on any other console, Tony Hawk's Motion would’ve caused a massive commotion in the video game industry. It perpetuated an injustice to at least one small, unlucky demographic though: Nintendo DS owners.
The unsuspecting consumers endured a counter-intuitive slog of a control scheme that relied on players tilting the console around like watching a person with vertigo through a kaleidoscope.
In the age of peripherals (mid-2000s), every franchise was indoctrinating these frivolous mechanics into their franchises due to Activision’s lucrative Guitar Hero series. As is often the case, though, people remember originality, not replication.
... As Activision themselves proved.
Despite the company capitalising on the fad that they invented, they were still susceptible to creating bad hardware when utilising this method and Tony Hawk’s Motion was the first casualty in this long line of lacklustre innovation.
Featuring an additional Motion pack which generated about as much kinetic energy as a corpse, Motion is a game that doesn’t control too bad. It controls unbelievably bad.
A prototypical video game from the first generation would probably contain just as much playability and it wouldn't be a surprise if the graphics looked next gen in comparison too. Don't waste your time or money on this utterly creatively bankrupt piece of lamentable media.