Here’s a riddle for you. I’ve never properly played a Tony Hawk’s game, yet I put more hours into Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater on the original PlayStation than anything else on the console. Okay, it’s not a particularly tough riddle to crack – like a lot of kids back then, demo discs were a lifeline, and there was one demo that ruled them all. The warehouse demo’s legendary – partly because it introduced a genre that would soon dominate the world of video games, and partly because it’s a perfect self-contained distillation of everything that’s great and good about skateboarding games.
Those two minutes fly close to perfection – or rather they give you the opportunity to fly as close to perfection as possible, using that small, well-defined warehouse with its abundance of ramps and rails to rack up combo after combo in pursuit of a high score. It’s so damn pure.
The recreation of that demo for the forthcoming remaster doesn’t quite have that same purity – this demo’s a pre-order bonus, though if you’re in the US you can also get hold of it by heading to your local Chipotle and ordering the Tony Hawk special burrito (what I’d give to be in the US – I’d love an excuse to get a burrito right now). Get down to it, though, and it seems Vicarious Visions has done a bang up job, and achieved what every decent video game remaster surely sets out to do – this feels exactly as good as you remembered it.
