Skateboarding legend Tony Hawk made waves on Tuesday by announcing that remastered versions of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 were in the works, and that “the game looks awesome.” It was shortly followed by an announcement trailer, which gives us everything we ever could have wanted.
Fully remastered versions of the games are coming to PC, PS4 and Xbox One in September — importantly with all the music returning that we know and love. Yes, this means that this fall we’ll all be humming “Superman” and remembering what it was like to play these games as kids.
In addition to all the classic features and modes we loved, developer Vicarious Visions is adding later additions to the series, like create-a-park, which will be different in its own right — allowing players to deform terrain pieces and truly make unique parks for the first time.
Honestly, it’s stunning this is coming to pass. Hawk’s relationship with publisher Activision was in tatters after the disastrous release of the much-reviled Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 in 2015. It was the unquestioned low-point for the series, receiving horrible reviews and rumored to have been rushed out the door to release before Hawk’s licensing agreement ran out. In 2018 Hawk announced that he’d split from Activision, but that the publisher owned the rights to the franchise. This made it seemingly impossible we’d actually get new versions of the games, which was compounded by the difficulties in re-securing rights to all the songs from the franchise.
Yet here we are.
I didn’t expect to get emotional over the return of a video game series, but we need this. We need the warm embrace of an old friend, and trying to set high scores on Hangar are in my future — and I couldn’t be happier.
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