Following the critical and commercial success of the “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2” remake in 2020, it was thought developer Vicarious Visions would get around to doing “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4” at some point in the future.
Those hopes were somewhat dashed only months later when Vicarious Visions, a subsidiary of Activision, was folded into their Blizzard Entertainment label. Vicarious changed its name to Blizzard Albany who was relegated to support for various titles for the company.
Hawk himself has confirmed on a live stream with Twisted Pixel Level Designer Andy Gentile (via VGC) that a remake of the third and fourth game was very much a real thing at one point, but now its dead:
“That was the plan even up until the release date of [Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2]. We were going 3 + 4. And then Vicarious got kind of absorbed and they were looking for other developers and then it was over.
The truth of it is that they were trying to find someone to do 3 + 4, but they just didn’t really trust anyone the way they did Vicarious, so they took other pitches from other studios, like, ‘What would you do with a THPS title?’ And they didn’t like anything they heard and then that was it.
I mean, who knows? Maybe when all the dust settles, we’ll figure it out. You never know. I would never have imagined that we were gonna do 1 + 2 20 years later.”
“Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2” became the fastest-selling game in the franchise, selling one million copies within its first two weeks. Vicarious also worked on 2017’s “Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy” which became an even bigger success with ten million copies sold in its first two years.
