Dust Off Those Controllers Because It Looks Like The Remastered Version Of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4 Is Finally Coming Out
The unstoppable march of time waits for no man. No matter how hard you try, you just simply can never get time back. It's an impossible reality to grasp as a child. You're 11-years-old up in your room ripping some Dr. Pepper and staying up all night playing THPS. You never even think about the idea that one day your life is going to be drastically different. You're going to be married with kids, old, have a job, the majority of your friends are all scattered across the country. Even if you're happy with where your life has taken you, you know that every day when you wake up you are one day further removed from that 11-year-old kid staying up way too late playing Tony Hawk's Pro Skater.
Now while it's true that you may never get that time back, you can at least attempt to recreate it. And that's what happened when Activision put out a remastered version of Tony Hawk's Pro Skaters 1+2 back in 2020.
The moment you turn on the game, it's like your immediately transported right back to the year 2000. Everything just comes rushing right back to you. It's like when you smell or taste something for the first time in a long time that instantly snaps you back to your childhood.
The game was perfect for dudes like myself who suck at every single newer video game. I think if I tried to play Call of Duty today, I'd die every 6 seconds. Is Call of Duty even the big game anymore? Or has everyone moved onto something different? Either way, all the button combinations for tricks are instantly recalled to your memory like they've been stored up in your brain for that exact moment. It's like you never stopped playing.
And the idea was that they were going to continue to remaster the rest of the games. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4 was supposed to come out in 2022, but then something happened with the developers of the game and it was scratched.
But very few journeys in life are linear. There are peaks and valleys, twists and turns along the way. So just because the game didn't come out in 2022, didn't mean that it was dead forever. Because now we're getting some teases that make it seem like THPS 3+4 is on the way.
I'd imagine the 03.04 date is a pretty clear giveaway here.
I know the original THPS will always be the most important game of the series, but I always thought Pro Skater 3 was the best. At least if we're not starting to count Underground. But Pro Skater 3 is where the game really started to take off. It was the first one that was made for the PlayStation 2, it had new skaters like Bam introduced to the characters, CKY "96 Quite Bitter Beings" on the soundtrack, and the Airport is an all-time great level.
And then Pro Skater 4 is where the series really started to get into some more world building. You'd have to skate around getting different goals from different characters throughout the level. You could get eaten by a lion at the zoo, you could skitch the cars. It was definitely moving the series away from the original THPS and closer to the Underground version of the game. It was the first one where didn't have to go to free skate mode if you just wanted to dick around for a couple hours.
So maybe 20 years have passed by and life is different than the way it was before. But it looks like at some point soon, you'll be able to put the baby down to sleep, finish up some work around the house, and then fire up Pro Skater 3 and 4 just like you used to. I'll take it.