Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3+4 remaster was inspired by YouTube and Reddit threads

Professional skater Jamie Foy remembers his first time playing a Tony Hawk Pro Skater game.

Having been on a skateboard since he was a year old, Foy saw Tony Hawk Pro Skater as a way to see himself in a video game, unlocking a world of creativity and inspiration for his craft that he’s never seen before.

“Once I got into playing skate games and realizing that I can do all these different tricks and that I can do all of these in the street, it made me fall in love with street skating,” Foy said over Zoom. “I fell in love with street skating because the world is already out there, with so many different structures, so now you have to go and create an art with it, which is one thing Tony Hawk Pro Skater showed me.”

That inspiration would take Foy to the streets of Australia (his favorite place to skate, due to the structure and use of stone and granite in the streets), Spain, and now into the world of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3&4 Remastered, where he becomes a playable character in the gaming series he grew up playing. The game will be available July 11. Almost five years after the last release of the game, the franchise came back to modern gaming, but the goal is both to be an ode to the previous games, while ushering in a new era of skating.

Kurt Tillmanns’ first experience with Tony Hawk came through Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3. As a kid, he would tag along with his older cousins and friends who would let him play the game. As he describes it, the game puts him in a “zen” state, where he would jump into free skate in the city of Rio and ride around for hours. Fast forward to 2025, Tillmanns is now leading the creative vision behind the remastering of the game he played as a kid, the head of the project behind THPS 3&4 Remastered.

In order to bring the remastering justice, he had to consult the greatest scribes and philosophical forums for where to go.

“We pored over a lot of the Reddit threads and YouTube videos,” Tillmanns said over Zoom. “We went back into the history books and that definitely informed our process throughout the development of the game.” Tillmanns also said that popular modding (adding modifications to popular games to keep them updated) communities such as Tony Hawk: Underground Pro helped to inform the development team on what the fans of the game want and have been adding in via mods in the time the game has been away.

Embracing the modernity of their fans and skaters while keeping the spirit of the game alive was one of the bigger challenges Tillmanns and the creative team faced when remastering THPS 3&4, but the one thing that unites both is the culture of skating. That’s reflected in the soundtrack, which is one of the biggest claims to fame that the gaming franchise has, but it goes deeper than that. Skateboarding in itself is just cool. From the music, to the clothing, to the freedom that a board and a random sidewalk can give you. It’s less structured orchestral music and more freelance, and Tillmanns had to make sure he kept that spirit alive. To do this, he talked with the new skaters that are in the game, including Foy.

“They [the skaters in the game] came to us with their ideas for what their characters wear, tricks they could do or certain things that are unique to them,” Tillmanns said. “Then we’ll go to the skaters and try and incorporate our vision into their character, but we want to make sure that what we add best represents the skater as a person.”

Because of how unique skating is, being sure to add the uniqueness of each skater helps to hammer home the art form behind skateboarding–while everyone skates, each style is unique to every skater. “It’s kind of like looking at a painting,” Foy said. “You see a certain painting and you can tell who the artist is behind it. That’s like watching a skater and when they skate a certain way, you can tell who it is. Skating helps you develop your own style and art form, becoming your own artist through that.”

Tillmanns used the phrase, “fantastic spaces and forbidden places” to describe the new environments in the game. A popular forbidden place is “Waterpark”, which Tillmanns describes to me as a shutdown theme park in the middle of the desert where you can skate through a waterslide tube. The inspiration for that one? Of course, YouTube. “We’ve seen a bunch of YouTube videos of skaters skating down these old closed down water parks, and know that’s a real skater fantasy,” Tillmanns said. “When we started to build it out, we wanted to make it even crazier. Just asking questions like what if the waterslide were 60 feet high, or what if you could go through a loop? We wanted to show that there was still juice in creating new Tony Hawk levels.”

Foy hopes the creativity of the remastered THPS 3&4 shows kids a new world of imagination, where they can push the limits of what can and can’t be done on a skateboard. “You can watch a skater do a trick in a video or go outside and try it, but when it gets hard you can come inside and let your mind go wild on the game and see all the crazy tricks you can do, then say that you can do those same things one day,” Foy said. “Tony Hawk Pro Skater is accessible to everyone, and with how prevalent video games are, it’s cool to see a skater have a good skating game to get inspiration from.”

Whether you’re an aspiring skater, or someone trying to grind rails on a lazy river, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3&4 Remastered has something for everyone, and through listening to the current generation, have built a game that can withstand time once again.