After a whole lot of speculation, rumors, winks, and nods, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 was officially unveiled this week with a 90-second trailer that showed off gameplay from the remakes alongside occasional cuts to the less detailed originals. Another thing the originals had less of? Product placement.
Brands, Brands, And More Brands
That isn’t to say that the original THPS3 and 4 were completely pure. When you’re making a sports game, some merch comes with the territory. Beyond that, I went back to take a look at the Airport level from THPS3, and it includes ads for Nokia. But that ad was for just one company and it was a fairly small one, at that.
Related
Please Re-Release The Game Boy Advance Tony Hawk’s Games
If you’re bringing back Tony Hawk’s, do it right.
Contrast that with the announce trailer for the remakes, which featured logos for Dickies, Globe, Etnies, Red Bull, Baker, MERGE4, Mob, Plan B, Vans, April, Taco Bell, Shorty’s, Frosted Flakes, Nixon, Depop, Stance, and Shake Junt. And that’s just what I — someone largely unfamiliar with skate brands — was able to identify. There are a few skateboard decks that feature art which might be branded, but I couldn’t make out a name. And there are multiple shots where the camera just moves too quickly or is too far away to make out what, exactly, is on billboards or skate ramps – though not so fast that we don’t notice they weren’t there in the few frames shown of the original games.
There’s even a noise that sounds an awful lot like the Taco Bell dong noise as the skaters grind past the restaurant.
Beyond that, the trailer ends with the announcement that the remake will feature ample crossover content with Doom. That isn’t shocking — the old THPS games featured Darth Maul and Spider-Man as hidden characters, and Crash Bandicoot gear showed up in THPS 1 + 2. I would give Doom a pass if it wasn’t the tie-in cherry on top of a product placement sundae.
And man, that product placement hits fast and heavy. Developers sometimes talk about how, in hands-off E3 demos, the person playing the game can’t divert from a narrow specified path through the level, or the entire presentation will fall apart. That’s sort of what this reminds me of. Not that the game would break beyond the bounds of the trailer, but that there are far more logos hidden just beyond the bounds of what the trailer shows us.
TheGamer’s editor-in-chief Stacey Henley wrote about a similar phenomenon in the trailer for Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, arguing that the product placement there could end up serving a deeper purpose as part of the game’s retrofuturist ’80s setting… or might just be the deal with the devil required to fund triple-A game development in the 2020s.
When studios like Naughty Dog are launching games once in a generation but aren’t able to do GTA 5 numbers, they have to make up the shortfall somehow. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4’s development is also, almost certainly, being funded by these deals. But why did a game this size need them?
The last one didn’t. I went back and watched the announcement trailer for Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 (which was also about 90 seconds long), and apart from a brand or two on a skater’s clothes or a board, there just isn’t any of this stuff. THUG and THAW had them a lot more, even including a McDonald’s in the New Orleans level, where there was the dual effect of being very obvious branding but also realistically recreating America, in which the streets are full of obvious branding.
The THPS games never had so much of this product placement, but the 3 + 4 trailer is practically cramming them into shots like Easter eggs. There are multiple Red Bull ads, and one of them appears on screen right next to a Frosted Flakes ad. Activision Blizzard seems to be packing this game full of as many logos as it possibly can. When skaters grind through a bathroom, causing water to gush out onto the tile floor, I half expected the urinals to have American Standard branding.
To me, that points to the publisher’s broader priorities. This collection was previously planned under Vicarious Visions before Activision Blizzard renamed the studio Blizzard Albany and moved it onto Diablo support. The project was resurrected at some point with Iron Galaxy handling development. It has never been as high a priority for Activision Blizzard as churning out additional content for its big live-service franchises. It seems that, when Activision Blizzard wouldn’t pony up the necessary cash, a frankly ridiculous amount of product placement may have been the necessary solution. If this is the way games are financed now, okay, I guess that’s the reality we live in. But a series as storied as Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater — that enjoyed its best sales ever with the last entry — shouldn’t have to turn to Frosted Flakes to get across the finish line.
Next
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 Is The Past, Present, And Future
THPS4 hauled THPS into the modern era in the early ’00s. It can do it again in 2025.