Tony Hawk's Pro Skater is a skateboarding sports game developed by Neversoft, released in 1999. It transformed skateboarding into a mainstream cultural force — its kinetic trick system, iconic licensed soundtrack, and perfectly tuned level design made it one of the most influential sports games ever made.
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater is a skateboarding sports game developed by Neversoft and published by Activision, released in August 1999 for the PlayStation. Players skate as professional skateboarders across compact, densely packed levels, chaining together tricks to build combos and meet score targets within a two-minute run.
The game's controls distilled skateboarding into an immediately accessible but deeply expressive system — ollie, kickflip, grind, manual — that rewarded mastery with increasingly elaborate combos. Each level contained hidden tapes, collectibles, and score thresholds that gave structure to the freeform skating. The sandbox nature of the levels, designed to reward exploration and creativity, set a template that countless games would follow.
The licensed punk and hip-hop soundtrack — including Goldfinger's "Superman," Dead Kennedys, and Rage Against the Machine — became inseparable from the game's identity and introduced many players to entire genres of music. It remains one of the most celebrated video game soundtracks of its era.
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater launched a franchise that dominated gaming and skateboarding culture through the early 2000s. Rolling Stone ranked it #23 on their 2025 list of the 50 Greatest Video Games of All Time, crediting it with bringing skateboarding culture to a global audience and defining an entire era of sports game design.