The History of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater: Ollies, Grabs, and Grinds

Extreme sports videogames have a long and storied history, culminating with the first Tony Hawk's Pro Skater in 1999, which ramped the genre to superstar status. As gamers have seen, nearly every game in this series has predecessors, and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater is no different.

Games like 720 Degrees, a 1986 arcade skateboarding game from Atari, and Skate or Die!, a 1987 multiplatform home release from Electronic Arts, made scores of gamers happy, but it was Tony Hawk's Pro Skater that would take the genre successfully into the realm of 3D[1], offering unparalleled levels of control and fluid motion so critical to such games, in turn spawning a whole slew of me-too products that wanted to outperform and be more extreme than skateboarding icon Tony Hawk himself.