The success of the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series was inevitably going to spawn spin-offs, but Activision really went for it. Thusly(?), let’s explore and celebrate their failed experiments. Note: We’ll be focusing on the home console versions, though in almost every case, a version was released for the contemporary Game Boy system, often developed by the legendary Vicarious Visions.
Mat Hoffman’s Pro BMX (and Pro BMX 2)
The only entry on this list to get a sequel, Mat Hoffman’s Pro BMX was Activision’s first attempt to branch out from Tony Hawk’s Pro Money-printer and was in development quickly enough that a demo shipped with Pro Skater 2. The game used a tweaked version of the Pro Skater engine and had similarly excellent level design. The controls were pretty much identical to Pro Skater, too, making it an easy pick-up-and-play alternative to the brutally tough Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX.
Mat Hoffman’s Pro BMX 2 was eventually released for the PlayStation 2 and ups the difficulty considerably, but it is still a rewarding experience and graphically impressive for the time. Interestingly, Pro BMX 2 also included an unlockable First-Person Shooter mode that was surprisingly fun!
Shaun Palmer’s Pro Snowboarder
Shaun Palmer’s Pro Snowboarder is the angsty step-brother to Pro Skater. Introduced as a pack-in demo to Pro Skater 3, Pro Snowboarder took the Pro Skater games‘ downhill levels and made them a lot chillier. The aesthetic is a lot more capital-X eXtreme than the other games, but it makes for a pretty unique experience that stands on its own. Gone are the in-menu hip-hop beats and 411VM aesthetics; in their place are brushed metal surfaces, nu-metal soundtracks, and tribal tattoos everywhere.
Despite being a pretty great game, it undersold, likely due to SSX‘s well-earned chokehold on the snowboarding genre at the time. A proposed sequel was cancelled, and like the other games on this list, Pro Snowboarder is only accessible via emulation. That said, if you only check out one game rom this list, for my money, you can’t do better than Shaun Palmer’s Pro Snowboarder.
Kelly Slater’s Pro Surfer
In 2002, Kelly Slater was to surfing what Tony Hawk had long been to skateboarding, so it’s no surprise that when Activision tried to milk a surfing game out of the Pro Skater engine, Kelly’s name would get slapped on the box. Tony even appears as a playable character, and Kelly appears in Pro Skater 4, complete with a surfboard. The game works surprisingly well for being a “square peg in a round hole” situation, and Treyarch used their experience on the legendary Pro Skater 2X to flex their chops in the engine.
The controls are pretty much the same as the other games in this engine, which is more intuitive than you may think, considering how different the two sports are. Movement is a lot more restricted, switching between side-scrolling and a reverse-chase perspective, but the game’s water graphics and physics did a lot to show off the still-new PlayStation 2’s capabilities. After this game’s success, Treyarch would be brought in to develop the aforementioned sequel to Shaun Palmer’s Pro Snowboarder, but unfortunately, that game never saw the light of day.
Wakeboarding Unleashed featuring Shaun Murray
While Tony Hawk found some of its greatest success in 2003 with the first Underground game, Activision would be gasping out their final non-skateboarding experiment in the engine with Wakeboarding Unleashed featuring Shaun Murray. Why it isn’t called Shaun Murray’s Pro Wakeboarding is anybody’s guess. Maybe Shaun Murray wasn’t a professional? Who’s to say? Like most of the other games on this list, this game was introduced to the world as a pack-in demo with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4.
The game had solid physics, awesome water effects, and a stellar soundtrack on par with the Pro Skater series. Developed by Shaba Games, who had previously made the truly excellent Grind Session, Wakeboarding Unleashed was a great game that probably would have been a hit if wakeboarding had even a fraction of the audience the other sports did. Unfortunately, that was not the case, and even today, wakeboarding remains a pretty niche sport, even by extreme, water-bound, board-based sports!
Of course, we’ve barely scratched the surface of what the Tony Hawk engine touched. I haven’t gotten into Apocalypse, the Bruce Willis-starring shooter that preceded Pro Skater but ran on the same engine, or Disney’s Extreme Skate Adventure game, which somehow turned Tarzan and Simba into viable skateboarders. Both are bizarre, fascinating offshoots that show just how versatile (and overextended) the Neversoft tech had become.
The Tony Hawks Pro Skater engine wasn’t just a foundation for a single franchise; it was a snapshot of a time when Activision thought every sport, every subculture, and apparently every Disney property could ride the same physics and pull a McTwist. Surprisingly, most of those experiments worked, and together they form one of the strangest, most oddly charming subgenres in early-2000s gaming history, and you can play almost all of them on retro handhelds today.
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