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[In the latest in a series of Gamasutra-exclusive bonus material
originally to be included in Bill Loguidice and Matt Barton's new book Vintage Games: An Insider Look at
the History of Grand Theft Auto, Super Mario, and the Most Influential Games of
All Time, the duo presents a history of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, the game
that popularized a niche genre and sparked a host of imitators in the early part of this decade.]
 Screenshot from Atari's 720 Degrees arcade game.
Extreme sports video games have a long and storied history,
culminating with the first Tony Hawk's Pro Skater in 1999, which ramped the
genre to superstar status. As we've seen, nearly every game in this series has
predecessors, and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater is no different.
Games like 720
Degrees, a 1986 arcade skateboarding game from Atari, and Skate or Die!,
a 1987 multiplatform home release from Electronic Arts, made scores of
gamers happy, but it was Tony Hawk's Pro Skater that would take the
genre successfully into the realm of 3D[1],
offering unparalleled levels of control and fluid motion so critical to such
games, in turn spawning a whole slew of me-too products that wanted to
outperform and be more extreme than skateboarding icon Tony Hawk himself.
Screenshot from Skate or Die!,
Commodore 64 version.
Of course, extreme sports -- also referred to as action or
adventure sports -- are not limited to the skateboard. The term can represent
any over-the-top or dangerous sporting activity, which is particularly at home
in the world of video games.
From the early Olympic sports video games, culminating
with Epyx's multiplatform California Games (1987), which featured skateboarding, freestyle footbag,
surfing, roller skating, flying disc, and BMX minigames, to the classic NBA
Jam (1993) and NFL Blitz (1997) series of highly stylized and
simplified arcade sports video games, there has been no shortage of compelling,
action-packed alternatives to traditional sports gaming.
What Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, which has now generated $1 billion in sales across the course of the series, added was an extraordinary level of realism
to the over-the-top antics that resonated with many players who were turned off
by the overly competitive nature of the previous games. By making it about
technique over style, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater expanded its audience to
far more players than any other game of its type before.
Screenshot from the surfing event in California Games, Commodore 64 version.
Box back for the Sony
PlayStation version of Midway's NBA Jam
Tournament Edition (1994).
 Screenshot from the arcade
version of Midway's NFL Blitz (1997),
which put a more violent twist on the over-the-top antics of the successful NBA Jam formula.
[1] Sega's
hit Top Skater (aka, Top Skater Sega Skateboarding) arcade
game from 1997, which featured a skateboard controller and railings as part of
its oversized cabinet, was one of the first 3D skateboarding simulations, but
was as much about racing as it was about performing stylish tricks.
Despite the
eventual release of mostly mediocre home skateboarding controllers thanks to
the popularity of games like Tony Hawk's
Pro Skater, Top Skater never
received a home port.
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"It wasn't until later in the development process that Tony Hawk was signed on and the game took on the name we all know."
I read an interview with Tony Hawk by a skateboarding magazine some 5 years ago where he said that the idea for doing a skateboarding game was his, and that he went around to the various video game companies pitching the idea and they laughed him off. He remembers one big brand-name company (was it Atari?) whose president laughed him out of the meeting and said, quote, "There is no market for a skateboarding video game." That's a famous quote and I'm disappointed to not see it and that piece of history here, in what is a history of the series. It's possible they had started THPS1 before he got on board, but it's important to note that he wasn't simply tacking his name onto an existing game, he had the idea and was trying to pitch the game on his own. This is also the reason why he's had such creative control and input over the series. I'd love if you could find the reference and update/post it here.
Joshua is correct that despite a mo-cap session attended by the videogame press (and it being a bullet point on the back of the box), all of the animations actually used in THPS1 were done by hand.
Motion capture used as a reference? Maybe... I think by the time we had that motion-capture session, the work on animations were well under way. But really, my memory is too fuzzy and I'm probably the wrong person to ask about how much influence the mo-cap ultimately had on the finished work.
The problems with actually using the mo-cap was that it was going to take way too much work to turn the raw data into something useful and, more importantly, it just plain didn't look as good as the hand made stuff (not as dramatic, etc...).
Work began in full in October 1998, by which time Tony Hawk was pretty much the name of the game. Tony's initial involvement was not major though. The mo-cap was done in April 1999, but there was never any expectation that the data would be very useful. Good publicity though. The actual animation was done by hand by Noel using video reference of various skaters - mostly from commercial skate videos. The game was finished in August 1999.