I never played Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4, so I don’t have skin(ned knees) in the game regarding the upcoming remake’s decision not to include the original’s campaign. I don’t even go here, I’m just excited to experience these two beloved games for the first time. But the choice to excise 4’s unique career mode for Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 has me wondering if I will, in any meaningful way, actually be experiencing 4 at all.
What Is Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 Changing?
If you’re late to the news, here’s a quick refresher. Most of the games in the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series drop players into each level in two-minute increments, challenging them to complete as many objectives as possible before the time runs out. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 didn’t do this. There was no time limit, and you would instead pick up challenges in-map by talking to NPCs. As TheGamer’s Editor-in-Chief Stacey Henley noted in her piece on the change, 4 was the transition point between the challenge-focused gameplay of the first three THPS games, and the open-ended Jackassery of the Tony Hawk’s Underground titles.
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The 4 remake is cutting that open-ended gameplay in favor of the same two-minute challenges from the first three games. That’s a problem. The maps weren’t designed with these shorter objectives in mind; they’re bigger to accommodate the freeform exploration between objectives. And as someone who was looking forward to experiencing these games for the first time, that sucks. Barring Activision Blizzard giving developer Iron Galaxy the go-ahead to add the campaign post-launch, this will inarguably be an incomplete version of the game.
What Is A Remake, Anyway?
It has me thinking about the nature of a remake and how much a game can be changed before it loses the essence of the original. We are sold a spectrum of game rereleases. There are ports, which don’t change anything except whatever is necessary to get the game running on a new system and maybe some UI. There are full remakes, like Resident Evil 2, which take the story, characters, and level design of the originals and reinterpret them with new graphics, a new perspective, and new gameplay.
And there are remasters, which stake out the middle. Sometimes they border on remakes (like the Crash and Spyro trilogy collections) and sometimes they only update the graphics while keeping the exact geometry of the level intact (like Halo: The Master Chief Collection and Tomb Raider I-III Remastered).
These faithful remasters often give players the fun option of swapping between new and old graphics with the press of a button.
When exactly does a port become a remaster? When does a remaster become a remake? It’s hard to say. You know it when you see it, I guess.
But what Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 is doing is an outlier. It isn’t ‘updating’ gameplay. In fact, it’s doing the opposite, reversing the evolutions of 4 to make it fall in line with the earlier games in the series. Where most remakes attempt to improve on their originals and provide a definitive experience, this is stripping away much of what made that particular game distinct in favor of a more streamlined experience.
It has me wondering: does this even constitute a remake at all? We sometimes use the words ‘environment’ and ‘level’ interchangeably, but really, they’re different things. An environment doesn’t become a level until the developers give the player a gameplay objective.
If Nintendo released a version of Metroid Prime Remastered where you could explore the full map from the original game, but couldn’t unlock Samus’ upgrades or fight boss battles, most players wouldn’t be happy just because it gave us a shiny version of the old map. As obvious as it sounds, games are defined by their gameplay and significantly altering the way you interact with a game’s environments kinda just makes it a different game.
Like I said, I don’t go here. I’ve dabbled with the Tony Hawk series (and spent a lot of time with 2, American Sk8land, and the 1 + 2 remakes) but it’s never been my favorite series. But this decision is bigger than Tony Hawk. It’s about how much change is acceptable before a new take on an old game is just an entirely new, and possibly worse game.
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