More than 25 years after the primary Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater put skateboarding video games on the map, builders are nonetheless discovering new methods to discover skating in video video games, particularly in 2025. Skateboarding followers are about to have some promising new video games to play, with Activision’s Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 remake releasing in July and EA is ready to launch its online-only, free-to-play Skate revival this 12 months.
In 2022, my colleague Andrew Webster wrote that we’re in a golden age for skateboarding video games, and issues haven’t actually slowed down. So what’s it that makes skateboarding so good for video video games, and permits so many various expressions of the game from completely different studios?
“I feel skateboarding is a type of issues that’s simply at all times cool,” THPS 3 + 4 recreation director Kurt Tillmanns tells The Verge. “It’s an evergreen fantasy, in each actual life and video games. Being a skateboarder is an indication of what and who’s cool.” He says “there’s a motive that we’re all in awe of what these individuals can do.” Part of what makes skateboarding cool is the music, vogue, and artwork, and video video games let individuals expertise that skateboarding tradition, too, Tillmanns says.
Also, “it’s safer,” jokes Andrew Schimmel, a senior producer at Snowman, the creators of the Skate City collection. He says there’s lots of people that may most likely like to attempt skateboarding however don’t need to danger breaking a bone. “Being in a position to dive right into a fantasy world the place you may act that out and see the gnarly penalties and never should endure from them is like instantly interesting.”
It helps that video games take so many various approaches to skateboarding. “The skate neighborhood is so various, so it is sensible that there’s an urge for food for all various kinds of video games — some extra reasonable, some extra arcade, some extra informal,” says Skate government producer Mike McCartney. For the brand new Skate, “it’s all about re-creating a skateboarding expertise that displays the liberty of exploration, discovery, and expression you see in skate tradition. We actually wished to respect the roots of the franchise, whereas bringing the sport ahead.”
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater video games will at all times have what’s within the title: “They’ve obtained Tony Hawk, they usually’ve obtained professional skaters,” Tillmanns says. That consists of issues like their kinds and their personalities — even the particular methods for the skaters are a illustration of their type in actual life. Tony Hawk could be very concerned, too, even with the 3 + 4 remakes. Hawk “is the place the tradition comes from” and he has a “actual eye for element” about what goes within the video games. “He is aware of that this recreation is the lexicon for skaters for the following few years,” based on Tillmanns.
The THPS collection additionally strikes a pleasant mixture of an arcade-y expertise and a skateboarding simulation. It has typically reasonable physics and areas, but in addition permits you to pull off outlandish methods, attempt for video game-y targets (S-Okay-A-T-E, anybody?), and play as some not-real characters in wacky locations.
For the Skate City video games, the Snowman staff needed to suppose loads about the right way to make skateboarding work on cellular. The first launched as an Apple Arcade unique, and Skate City: New York is presently an unique there, too, so the Snowman staff had to determine a cellular management scheme that “feels novel and suits the game” that’s additionally approachable sufficient to serve a large viewers, Schimmel says. Your two thumbs characterize your back and front foot, and also you flick your thumbs to emulate flick methods with skateboarding.
Developers I spoke with suppose there’s nonetheless loads of methods skateboarding video games can develop, too. “Skateboarding by no means stops evolving and neither will our recreation,” Skate’s head of inventive, Jeff Seamster, says. “The creativity of skaters constantly blows my thoughts. The spots they discover, the methods they’re (nonetheless) inventing, the colourful type… we couldn’t have imagined right this moment’s scene from the place we had been standing 15, 10, and even 5 years in the past. So, who is aware of what we’ll see tomorrow?”
“Multiplayer and on-line can at all times be the following frontier,” Tillmanns says. THPS 3+4 can have crossplay, and the staff is worked up about “growing that pool of on-line gamers to one thing that we’ve by no means seen earlier than in a Tony Hawk recreation.”
Schimmel factors to video games like OlliOlli World (a cartoony, side-scrolling skateboarding journey) and Skate Story (a psychedelic-looking skateboarding recreation set to launch this 12 months) which can be highlighting skateboarding in numerous methods. “In phrases of what hasn’t been carried out, I feel there’s most likely heaps to discover,” he says.
