'Tony Hawk' Stays True To What Made It Great

In a nostalgia-fueled move from a 50-year-old skater who can still shred better than half the wannabe teenagers in San Diego, it looks like coming this September, the first two games from the Tony Hawk video game series are getting a remastering.

The games were totally sick, and while it would've been easy to design them so that they were nothing more than a series full of situations forcing you to button mash until you hit a trick, they ended up being so much more. One of the biggest things that kept you going was the chance to keep unlocking stuff -- new boards, new pro skaters, new skate parks, and even Jango Fett for some reason.

And on top of that, there were cheat codes galore that let you do things like play as Spider-man ...

... and freaking fly, giving you the potential for unlimited combos in the air.

Any greedy marketing exec would look at this stuff, which was arguably the coolest part of the game, and start twitching like a maniac at the thought of all the DLC money he could make off that kind of stuff. Playing a Tony Hawk game but being forced to pay for access to Bob Burnquist would be like having to pay Nintendo extra money to use Luigi. That'd be such bullshit.

Fortunately, it looks like that isn't gonna happen. At least at the launch, these remastered games are going to feature standard unlocking, the way the original games were, and the way they were meant to be played. That 100% keeps with the skate-punk vibe that imprinted on us all those years ago, and it'll be great to hit these games again without being asked for a credit card number every time we want to do something cool.

Isaac is on Twitter and Instagram @NotFunnyIsaac and desperately wishes he could get Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 to boot back up on his old Game Boy Advance.

Top Image: Tony Hawk/Activision/Twitter