TONY HAWK: The very beginning of what
became Tony Hawk's Pro Skater was Activision calling me,
because they had heard that I was pitching a video game
to different developers.
And they said, hey, we heard you're
trying to work on a video game.
We're actually doing a video game with skateboarding,
and we'd like to see if you want to be involved.
And I went up to Activision.
They handed me a Playstation controller.
They had a bunch of suits in this meeting in a conference
room.
On the screen was Bruce Willis with a gun
strapped to his back on a skateboard skating
through a desert landscape.
And I started controlling him and doing tricks and doing
ollies and doing kickflips.
And I just immediately sensed that this it.
This was the control scheme.
It was intuitive.
It was fun, even though I was just doing basic tricks
on the ground.
And the reason it was Bruce Willis is because Activision
had just done a game called Apocalypse,
and Bruce Willis was the star of it.
And so I realized right then that with my resources,
with my experience, with my connections,
we can make this something that the skaters would really like.
And I basically signed on right then.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
NARRATOR: Tony Hawk's Pro Skater.
Now everyone thinks they can skate like Tony.
By the time the game was set to come out,
Activision had offered me a buyout of future royalties.
Substantial amount.
The kind of money I never heard anyone speak to me.
They're like, we want to give you a half a million dollars.
I was like, a half million at that time in my life
sounded like someone said a trillion billion dollars.
That seemed absurd.
And I had just hit a stride in my skating
again where I was doing pretty well with royalties.
I was doing pretty well with competition.
And I had just bought a pretty nice house, and I thought,
I don't really need that kind of money right now.
And I'd rather let this ride and see what happens.
And I mean, at that time, it seemed crazy
that I would do that.
It was the best financial decision I made in my life
for sure.
When the game came out, it was a big success critically.
It was a pretty big success in sales but not massive.
But they immediately started working on the second one.
And when we got to work on the second one,
I knew we had something that was beyond just skating.
It was something that video game players actually enjoyed.
And when the second one came out,
that's when everything changed.
Because the second one got, I mean,
it's one of the best reviewed video games of all time.
Suddenly we had a franchise.
And suddenly people were picking up skateboards
because they played a video game.
And that was not something I expected.
I expected that this game would inspire
skaters to buy video game systems because they
want to emulate.
They wanted to do tricks that they wished
they could do in real life.
And then suddenly there was this massive shift
where video gamers or people that
just are kind of curious about video games
bought our title first and that inspired them to start skating.
And there's a whole generation of kids right now
that started skating because they played that game.