It’s almost insulting how easily this skating-game remake pushes my millennial nostalgia buttons. The second that Ace of Spades comes on over a montage of skaters on the title screen, I am forcefully yanked back to the early 00s, when I spent untold hours playing one Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater game or another in the gross bedrooms of my teen-boy friends. More than 20 years later, I can almost smell the acrid lingering odour of Lynx body spray.
In 2020, the first couple of Tony Hawk’s games were polished up and re-released as the first wave of Y2K nostalgia hit. The two games were packaged up as one, with consistent controls and a new look that preserved the grungy feel of the originals, and the same is true for 3+4: levels, skaters and parks from both 2001’s THPS3 and 2002’s THPS4 rock up here alongside newer stars of the sport (including Riley Hawk, son of the eponymous skating celebrity – I found this oddly touching).
I remember these places so well – the factory, the college campus, the snow-dusted Canadian skate park, the time capsule of central London. Weirdly, the zoo level is now empty of animals (why?), but otherwise these compact arrangements of grindable, trickable urban obstacle courses are very much as they were. (The skater-punk soundtrack, unfortunately, is not as it was – there are a great many omissions, a disappointment only partly softened by a slew of new tracks.) Between grabs, spins, flips and manuals you can string together insane and risky combos across their entire geography, skidding across power lines, along walls and finding hidden half-pipes.
I do not remember all of this being so hard, however. My first few hours with these games were a humiliation, as I grappled with the controller and baled over and over again trying to meet even the minimum required scores in each two-minute run. Was I always this bad at these games? Whatever muscle memory I once had is gone, but I am slowly building up a respectable set of virtual-skating skills again. There are more complex moves and traversal tricks to keep in mind here than there were in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2, which is a more arcadey experience, and a better place to start if you weren’t there for these games the first time round.
Like the real sport, it’s about perseverance and repetition: when the combos started to flow again for me after a few hours, it felt so freeing. I still don’t think there’s a better skating game out there than old-school Tony Hawk’s, even after all this time – and there’s certainly no better time capsule of this pivotal moment in the history of the sport.