Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 is a skating simulation / sports game where you score points by landing tricks, doing ‘grinds’, and soaring over gaps in strings of combos. The levels are designed to cater to offering many opportunities to string together multiple tricks with ramps, rails and half pipes lined up in ways just begging for the player to use them in sequence. The player is also gifted with an avatar that skates with inhuman ability, able to reach airborne heights and perform consistent tricks in ways that no ordinary person would be able to accomplish in real life. Even when the player drops from bone-shattering heights the avatar is quickly on their feet again, ready to keep skating.
The game features a level editor allowing players to create their own custom levels with a variety of assets, including pools, park benches, rails and ramps. Pieces can be rotated, stacked, connected and framed to one’s heart’s desire. So I decided to put my architectural background to good use and create the world’s worst skate park.
I placed half-pipes next to walls and spike pits, columns between ramps and rails leading into trees. I was determined to create an environment full of hazards, something to really teach those no-good skaters to keep out of my beautiful parks. Didn’t they read the ‘no skateboarding’ signs posted?! This’ll show them.
Testing the level out was the fun part. I haven’t played the game in ages and had totally forgotten most of the controls. I honestly wonder if anyone’s really memorized how to perform the individual tricks, being mapped individually to directional combinations and button presses without much in-game significance. Trying to relearn how to grind was a bit difficult in a place that essentially made many tricks difficult to start, let alone finish. But I got the hang of it after running into walls countless times and accidentally trying to do flipkicks while soaring into rails.
I placed a few planters by the level’s border wall that, when ridden on the side, cause the player to slant. This caused the player model to clip through the wall, sometimes in manners that were difficult to reverse. In some cases, I was able to get the player to be irreversibly trapped in parts of the level. The player character frequently slipped off ramps and pipes, bumped into objects, struggled between the edges of two surfaces…
It was terrible.
I also made a second level, this time trying to take the role of a ‘landscape architect’. I wanted to create the most beautiful park I could for good ol’ Tony. I gave this new park a generous amount of foliage, with a pool in the middle and park benches lining a forest path and a string of taxis along the edge as if it were New York City. The editor is very limited in its offering of assets for beautifying a night-lit skatepark (only 3 plants?) but I think I pulled together something passable.
Maybe not.
I think my main takeaways from this exercise were the playfulness that can be afforded in entertainment that isn’t within the scope of the game’s intentions. I enjoyed intentionally trying to cause glitches, laughing about my poor skateboarding skills and trying to succeed at something that just wasn’t going to work. What originally gave me the idea to explore this was a night a few weeks ago with my younger brother where we played a bunch of sub-par Nintendo 64 titles to see how ridiculous the low-poly world was. THPS3 was certainly one of the better titles, but it doesn’t exempt it from being laughable in the zany situations you can create with it.
Tyson Moll 