In a recently published video appearing on the “Did You Know Gaming?” YouTube channel, video game researcher Liam Robertson revealed that after the successful launch of the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 remake, an additional pitch was made by developer Vicarious Visions (now Blizzard Albany) to Activision which would see the following two titles in the series receive the same treatment but it was rejected.
Interestingly, it appears that the remake was originally meant to include Pro Skater 3 and Pro Skater 4, a Vicarious Visions source explained to Robertson. The deciding factor for the third and fourth entries getting cut seems to boil down to a shortage of time on the developer’s part.
“Eventually it became clear that we didn’t have time for more than 1+2, so the idea that we’d continue on and release 3+4 in some fashion was on the table,” the source explained.
“We settled on adding some handling features from the later games to reflect the way people remember the old Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games. The improvements from 3 seemed to bleed into people’s memories of the first 2.”
The Vicarious Visions source went on to claim that, after presenting the proposal for the third and fourth entry’s remake to Activision, the team were promptly denied – with the publisher instead preferring the team to focus on the Call of Duty franchise going forward.
In a 2022 livestream, Tony Hawk corroborated these claims while also clarifying that Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 remakes were always planned – until Vicarious Visions was fully merged with Activision.
“That was the plan, even up until the release date of [1 and 2],” said Hawk. “We were doing 3 and 4, and then Vicarious got kind of absorbed, and then they were looking for other developers, and then it was over.”
Hawk further claimed that Activision attempted to find another studio for the potential remake follow-up, but were ultimately unsatisfied with the results.
“The truth of it is [Activision] were trying to find somebody to do 3 and 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 the THPS title?’ And they didn’t like anything they heard, and then that was it.”
Finally, Hawk leaves some hope out there for fans of the series, implying the ill-fated remake may see the light of day at some point in the distant future. “Who knows? Maybe when the dust settles, we’ll figure it out. You never know. I never would’ve thought we were going to do 1 and 2 twenty years later.”
Source: Did You Know Gaming
Written by Ryan Pretorius