The Best PlayStation Game Every Year 1994 - 2024

It’s the new millennium - the era of invincible cell phones, wallet chains and kids feeling weird desires to eat fruit-scented gel pens because they smelt so good. It was also when things were at an all-time high for the extreme.

For example, the two best-selling PlayStation games in the year 2000 were Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2.

Sure, THPS2 came very quickly after the first but it successfully delivered on the excitement generated by its predecessor with a wealth of new content. There were new multiplayer modes, far more skaters to play as, and loads of secret areas to discover in the game’s roster of memorable maps. It also might seem minor put Pro Skater 2 was the first game to feature a surprising unlockable character in the form of Spider-Man, which would set a precedent for future games that became as much of a talking point as anything else.

The real difference maker was the Create a Skater and Create a Park modes. Allowing gamers to contribute to the sandbox and then take themselves into those creations really took advantage of the medium’s ability to make players feel like they were part of something, illuminating a path for many sports and non-sports games to come. And, in fact, in the same way Doom's mods had done in the 90s, THPS probably inspired gamers to want to be developers.

Your mileage may vary on which game in the series is the outright best, but the second instalment came at the extreme sports fever pitch.