Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 remasters were planned, but scrapped

No less a source than Tony Hawk himself has confirmed that it “was the plan” to remaster Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4. Breaking millennial hearts everywhere, however, he says the skateboard games were cancelled after Vicarious Visions, the studio that made the well-received THPS 1+2 remakes, was merged into Blizzard in April.

The legendary skater just dropped the news on a livestream, which came to us via Okami Games on Twitter. Host Andy ‘andyTHPS’ Gentile, whose skill at the games landed him a job out of high school at original developer Neversoft and then at Vicarious Visions to work on the 1+2 remake, says: “If there’s a 3 and 4, you know how to reach me.”

“I mean, that was the plan”, Hawk replies. “Even up until the release date of [1+2], we were going 3+4. And then Vicarious got kinda absorbed, and [Activision] were looking for other developers, and then it was over.”

Interestingly, we might’ve got an entirely new and different THPS title. Gentile and Hawk were playing the THPS 1+2 remakes on stream with viewers, one of whom prompts a further tidbit from Hawk: “the truth of it is [Activision] were trying to find someone to do 3+4 but they just didn’t really trust anyone the way they did Vicarious, so they took other pitches from other studios, like ‘what would you do with a THPS title?’ And they didn’t like anything they heard, and that was it.”

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 remasters were in the works but they were scrapped after Vicarious Visions was merged into Blizzard. ????

Source: Tony Hawk.https://t.co/84rlYDgvUQ pic.twitter.com/oWR70xTOYv

— Okami Games (@Okami13_) June 20, 2022

It’s rare these days for sports games beyond FIFA or Madden to break into gaming’s mainstream, but the millennial obsession with extreme sports saw many such successes, of which Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater was undoubtedly the biggest. A series of genuinely great skating games fizzing with alt rock soundtracks, it was a bona fide cultural moment that still lives fondly in the memories of millions of ’00s-era gamers. The remakes of the first two games captured and enhanced their spirit perfectly and were a wonderful, nostalgic surprise in autumn 2020 – here’s our take on them.

News that 3+4 won’t get the same treatment isn’t surprising given the absorption of Vicarious – now known as Blizzard Albany – and, well, the total lack of any announcement of any kind. But it still sucks to learn that it was planned and then scrapped.

Console yourself by watching andyTHPS stream the remakes on Twitch. His channel trailer features an endorsement by Tony Hawk, who says he landed that Neversoft job because his skills somehow blew up on social media even before social media existed.