Professional skater Jamie Foy remembers his first time having played a game of skater Tony Hawk Pro.
Having been on a roller board since he was a year old, Foy saw Tony Hawk Pro Patineur as a way to see himself in a video game, unlocking a world of creativity and inspiration for his job that he has never seen before.
“Once I have entered playing skate games and realize that I can do all these different tips and can do all of this on the street, it made me fall in love with street skating,” said Foy on Zoom. “I fell in love with street skating because the world is already there, with so many different structures, so now you have to go and create an art with it, which is one thing Tony Hawk Pro showed me.”
This inspiration would take Foy into the streets of Australia (his favorite place to skate, due to the structure and the use of stone and granite in the streets), in Spain, and now in the world of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 & 4 Remastered, where he becomes a playable character in the series of games he grew up. The game will be available on July 11. Almost five years after the last release of the game, the franchise returned to modern games, but the goal is both to be an ode to previous games, while inaugurating a new skating era.
Kurt Tillmanns’ first experience with Tony Hawk came by Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3. As a child, he would label his older cousins and friends who would let him play the game. As he describes, the game puts him in a “Zen” state, where he would jump in a free skate in the city of Rio and rolled for hours. Quick advance until 2025, Tillmanns now leads the creative vision behind the remastering of the game he played when he was a child, the project manager behind Thps 3 & 4 RemaStered.
In order to bring remastering justice, he had to consult the greatest scribes and philosophical forums for where to go.
“We have traveled a lot of Reddit sons and YouTube videos,” said Tillmanns on Zoom. “We have returned to history books and that has definitely informed our process throughout the development of the game.” Tillmanns also said that popular modding (adding changes to popular games to keep them up to date) such as Tony Hawk: Underground Pro has helped inform the development team about what game fans want and added via mods when the game was absent.
To embrace the modernity of their fans and skaters while keeping the spirit of the game alive was one of the greatest challenges that Tillmanns and the creative team were confronted during the MPS 3 and 4 remasterison, but the only thing that unites both is the culture of skating. This is reflected in the soundtrack, which is one of the greatest claims to the glory that the gaming franchise has, but it goes further than that. The skateboard in itself is just cool. From music to clothes, freedom that a board and a random sidewalk can give you. It is less structured orchestral music and more freelance, and Tillmanns had to make sure that he kept this living spirit. To do this, he spoke with the new skaters who are in the game, including Foy.
“They [the skaters in the game] came to us with their ideas for what their characters wear, the tips they could do or certain things their own, “said Tillmanns.” Then we go to skaters and try to incorporate our vision into their character, but we want to make sure that what we add is best the skater as a person. “”
Due to how skating is unique, be sure to add the unique character of each skater helps hammer the art shape behind the skateboard – while everyone is patina, each style is unique to each skater. “It’s a bit like looking at a painting,” said Foy. “You see a certain painting and you can say who is the artist behind. It’s like looking at a skater and when they skate in a certain way, you can say who is. Skating helps you develop your own style and your art form, becoming your own artist through this.”
Tillmanns used the sentence, “fantastic spaces and prohibited places” to describe the new game environments. A popular prohibited place is “waterpark”, which Tillmanns describes me as a theme theme park in the middle of the desert where you can skate through a toboggan tube. Inspiration for that one? Of course, Youtube. “We have seen a lot of skating skaters YouTube videos on these old closed water parks, and know that it is a real skater fantasy,” said Tillmanns. “When we started to build it, we wanted to drive it even more crazy. Asking questions as if the slide was 60 feet high, or if you could go through a loop? We wanted to show that there was still juice in the creation of new levels of Tony Hawk.”
Foy hopes that the creativity of the MP 3 & 4 remastered shows children a new world of imagination, where they can push the limits of what can and cannot be done on a roller board. “You can watch a skater make a tip in a video or take it out and try it, but when it becomes hard, you can enter inside and let yourself relax in the game and see all the crazy tips you can do, then say that you can do these same things one day,” said Foy. “Tony Hawk Pro skiner is accessible to everyone, and with the distribution of video games, it’s cool to see a skater having a good skating game to draw inspiration.”
Whether you are a budding skater or someone is trying to grind rails on a lazy river, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 & 4 Remastered has something for everyone, and listening to the current generation, has built a game that can resist again.
