How Did I Get Here by Tony Hawk, Pat Hawk Read Free Book Online Page A

would not leave until he beat the game, and as a result he failed out of college. We’re wondering if you’d pick up his share of the rent?
    â€œFor Activision, THPS was the game,” Stohl said. “The initial expectations were that we’d sell 500,000 to 700,000 units. But then we released it, and every week the buzz kept growing and growing. You could see it spreading through word of mouth.”
    It ended up selling more than 7 million copies.
    The first release did very well, but the second release, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 , was an even bigger hit, especially among serious gamers. According to the review-aggregation web site Metacritic.com, THPS2 was the best-reviewed video game of the decade, with an average rating of 98 out of 100. It was the second-best selling game of 2000, and at one point was No. 1 on the bestseller list while the first game was still in the top five. Activision sold more than 6.5 million copies of the second game in the first three years of its release.
    From 1999 to 2007, Activision released at least one game a year:
    1999 Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater
    2000 Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2
    2001 Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3
    2002 Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4
    2003 Tony Hawk’s Underground
    2004 Tony Hawk’s Underground 2
    2005 Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland
    2006 Tony Hawk’s Project 8 (and Tony Hawk’s Downhill Jam for Wii)
    2007 Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground
    Tony,
    You might benefit from naming your video games in a way that would offend fewer American parents. ‘‘American Wasteland’’_my ass. Tony Hawk’s whole f’in life is a waste. Leave America. You are not f’in worthy! You little f’n punk.
    The games spawned a steady stream of competing action-sports titles vying for a share of this new market, and I’m still proud to have helped create a gaming genre that helped to solidify skating’s place as a legitimate sport—in the real world as well as the virtual world. And despite an ever-growing list of competitors, the THPS series remains the best selling action-sports franchise of all time.
    Kicking the Reset Button
    After eight years, the Neversoft development team was feeling burned out on the Tony Hawk skateboarding game control scheme. I don’t blame them. Also, they were shifting focus to the amazingly successful Guitar Hero game.
    But I wanted to jumpstart the game, so I brought an idea to Activision that had been rolling around in my head for a few years: make a skateboard-shaped controller that people could stand on to control what they see on screen. The industry was already moving in that direction, with motion-based controllers like Nintendo’s Wii and peripheral-based games like Guitar Hero and Garage Band.
    I ran the idea by Dave Stohl, now the company’s executive vice president of studios. Dave jumped on it. He put a new Activision development team in charge—Robomodo in Chicago—and we hit the reset button on the franchise. I knew it would be risky, since nothing like it had been tried before, but I figured it was like learning a new skate trick: if you want to progress, you have to be willing to slam.
    DEAR TONY HAWK,
    I LOVE TO PLAY YOUR GAMES. BUT MY MOM WON’T LET ME PLAY IT BECAUSE IT HAS SMOKING AND CUSSING.
    With the new direction, we had to go back to square one with almost all facets of the game. The first and most important task was designing the controller. We went through many incarnations, and Robomodo now has a hilarious graveyard of prototypes in their office, some of which are downright embarrassing. My favorite was a blank skateboard deck with trackballs on it to slide your foot across. It was almost as hard as real skating and would have definitely thrown people on their asses. We settled on a device that resembles a skate deck (a little shorter and thicker than the real thing) and responds to motion via two accelerometers and four infrared