In 2014, four years after its original release, Skate 3, the third and most chaotic entry in EA’s series of skateboarding video games, was reprinted. The game had become an unexpected hit on YouTube. A bevy of bugs and glitches made it the ideal text for let’s players and streamers, those presenters who typically seek games that elicit reactions of laughter or fear on camera, those extremes of emotion that most appeal to audiences in this newly minted medium. One early compilation of ragdoll pratfalls and gravity-shanking stunts led the charge. It now has close to 5 million views. Sales rose, skaters collapsed and EA found itself an improbable pioneer as the publisher of a game whose success was founded upon failure.
Tony Hawks Pro Skater 5Publisher: ActivisionDeveloper: RobomodoPlatform: Reviewed on Xbox OneAvailability: Also available on PS4, Xbox 360 and PS3
Activision may be hoping that Tony Hawks 5 repeats its old rival’s trick. This, the fifth game in a series that debuted in 1999, is broken in similar kinds of ways. Bail from a grind and your skater might, on hitting the ground, disappear up to his neck in solid concrete. Strike a half-pipe at the wrong angle and your character’s body may cartwheel through the air in majestic slow motion, before the game jump-cuts jarringly back to the action. It’s as if the shot was directed by a mildly distracted editor who notices an awful accident occurring on-screen slightly too late to pan away, but just in time to save the audience from the distress of seeing someone break their neck.
Some glitches prove helpful. Find a short rail positioned between two walls and, if you keep the grind button held down, your skater may ping-pong automatically between the obstacles, racking up a stratospheric combo with each flopping rebound. While the sight of an aging Tony Hawk phasing stoically through various pieces of masonry is often humorous, not every glitch is suitable for the You’ve Been Framed treatment. Activision and developer Robomodo’s logos, the first things you see in the game, frequently stammer on load. Has there ever been an earlier foreshadowing in a broken game of what is to come?
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 is a glitchy mess Watch on YouTube
The concept is, nevertheless, sound. Tony Hawks Pro Skater 5 was intended to return to the series’ roots, those early and beloved PlayStation games that were defined by long, improbable combos stretching luxuriously across the scenery. This was, surely, a practical choice as much as a nostalgic one; in 2012 Robomodo developed Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD, a compilation of the series’ early levels, rebuilt in the Unreal Engine. Tony Hawks 5 was seemingly built on the code and lessons learned when developing that modestly priced downloadable excursion. And, to a certain extent, the rhythm and feel of the earliest games in the series has been recreated. Some of the game’s eight stages return to classic locations such as the School and Warehouse and you immediately view the scenery through the famished eyes of the high-score chaser, figuring out lines where it’s possible to, for example, turn a grind into a kick-flip across a gap, then land into a manual and, finally, drop down into a half-pipe.