Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 and 2 is the sweet trip down memory lane we all need

Tony Hawk is back, fam.

2020  has been an absolutely awful year. It’s been filled with tragedy after tragedy.

First, we lose Kobe and Gigi Bryant. Then, coronavirus. Now, we’re trying our best to eradicate all of the social ills that come with our society. It’s just all so much to deal with all the time.

That’s why it felt so good to finally get my hands on a demo of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 and 2 set to release next month.

It turned out this game was the exact decompresser I needed to just…zone out with for a second. The thing was I had no idea it was going to be that. But almost immediately upon turning the game on, I felt it.

As a kid growing up, the Tony Hawk Pro Skater series was the thing to play. I remember being so hype to just get the demo disc from Pizza Hut to play this game over and over again for just minutes at a time.

When I opened the demo on my PlayStation 4, some 21 years later, I felt that same feeling.

The music was the first thing that took me there. Immediately, in the game’s opening sequence, Light’s Out by Guerrilla Radio starts playing and I’m instantly taken back to the year 2000.

But, immediately, you can tell it’s not just a reproduction of the game. It’s a complete remaster. Graphically, it’s clearly a current generation game. But, internally, it’s a time capsule one finds themselves spending hours digging through.

The demo was set on the warehouse level from the original Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater game. The demo allows you to run a quick two minute skate session as Tony Hawk shredding through the level. There are no real goals. Just rack up as many points as you can.

As in love with this game as I was immediately, I was also terrible at it — just like I was back in 2000 at just 8 years old.

My first run was only 8,117 points. A far cry from the 100,000 marks I used to hit back in the day, but whatever.

There was lots of wrecking. LOTS of it.

As time went by and memories came back, I got the hang of the controls and remembered some of the old tricks I used to do to rack up points. Lots of rail grinding, lots of nose planting, a bunch of constant 360’s and high air. There were multiple attempts to land the 900, but they were all failures. It’s all good though. The effort was what counted.

Eventually, I finally eclipsed the 30,000 point mark. Not great, but totally good enough to be satisfied as an old and washed Pro Skater vet in his mid-20’s.

The thing was, as terrible as I was at it, putting the controller down felt impossible. This game took me back to a much simpler time. Nostalgia is the best seller of all and this game was chock full of it. To go back in time, even for a just a few minutes, was such a treat.

We’ll see what the full game is hitting on when it drops in September. But, until then, the satisfaction of knowing that Tony Hawk is back in video game form just as good as he used to be is more than enough for me.