Superman: Level Interactions in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater

Here's a question: Is Tony Hawk's Pro Skater linear or open-world? Unlike Gunstar Heroes or Metro 2033, Tony Hawk's levels don't funnel the player along a single path to a definite end. Instead, like the map of a Witcher or Lode Runner, they are sandbox-like, and so are their objectives. In THPS 1's Warehouse, the player could choose to smash the crates, then grab the secret tape, then grind the big rail, or rearrange those objectives in any order. They could also pursue any of the seven other objectives in the stage.^[1] The level design accommodates this mixing and matching and allows the player relatively easy access to any objective item from any other.

We also select which park we play in Tony Hawk à la carte. There is no rule that we have to complete School, then Mall, then Skate Park, because the structure doesn't require that we "finish" one level to unlock the next. Instead, each unlocks when we have completed a certain total number of objectives across all stages. We could decide to play some of Mall and then backtrack to Warehouse before jumping two levels ahead when the chain comes off of Skate Park. But not so fast. If we want to make the case that THPS is non-linear, we're confounded by the fundamental unlock order for the stages. As in Gunstar or Metro, there's no entering a level until we win access to it, and we receive the keys to levels in a predetermined sequence. That sequence is the top-level organisation of the campaign. Tony Hawk is proof that sometimes a game is the wrong shape to fit entirely into either the linear or open-world category. In 1999, long before the likes of Rockstar and Ubisoft had popularised sandbox sprawl, THPS was already blurring the lines between it and other game layouts.

Free Skate

In diagramming THPS's flow, we learn three lessons. Firstly, "linearity" is not a property that applies to only one characteristic of a game. In Tony Hawk, we can see that the orders in which we play levels, unlock levels, and reach goals within stages can all be linear or non-linear. This is why THPS and its lookalikes can't simply be tattooed as "linear" or "non-linear"; some of their structures are from the first category and some from the second.

Secondly, for a game to be open-world, it needs a contiguous map on which all play takes place, or which, at least, acts as an expansive hub from which stages can be accessed. That leaves room for game environments that are open-plan without being open-world. This includes Tony Hawk's settings, which have plenty of empty space and throughlines between interactables but aren't the interconnected cantons of a Far Cry or Asheron's Call. This open-plan but not open-world architecture also exists in Snake, Umurangi Generation, and most multiplayer shooters, just to give a few examples. Tony Hawk's stages are designed a little like shooter arenas.

That takes us to lesson three: objective structures inform level structures. Just so we're covering all our bases here: even in games where levels are open, there may still be a single progression line through them in a given episode or when pursuing a single objective. Just look at Yooka-Laylee or Borderlands. For the sake of simplicity, in this article, we'll think about linear movement that is enforced by the basic level design, rather than linear movement that is enforced by player choice, quest parameters, or episode parameters. We'll think about levels that flow something like this:

If there are tasks to accomplish at every one of the numbered points, completing them outside of the numbered order is probably inefficient and definitely involves plenty of backtracking. It's a lot of needless schlepping through areas the player has already seen and domains they've potentially plundered of collectables and enemies. Substituting that level structure with one like this ensures a reduced travel time between objectives while allowing the player to retain control over which objectives they pursue when:

Therefore, games with linear objective structures tend to have levels that are straight lines or support straight lines through them, while games with dynamic objective structures have levels that aren't too much longer than they are wide. The closer a level is to a circle or a polygon that's equal on all sides, the faster any one location in it can be accessed from any other, reducing the average travel time between selected objectives. In Tony Hawk, it's imperative that players can reach the next goal quickly because runs are capped at one or two minutes. With this layout, players will also have a reduced bias in the goals they pick. A couple of levels in the original THPS are exceptions to the "equal sides" rule: Mall and Downhill Jam, but we'll come back to them. For now, we'll tackle the terror that an open level structure still doesn't entirely prevent: backtracking.

Revert

Imagine that when a player travels around a park in Pro Skater, they leave a line behind them. They're going to redraw over the same rough line as they skate places they've skated before. They'll do this to repeat tricks on certain objects and attempt goals they failed previously. If a relatively linear game like Psychonauts or Bad Dudes implored you to run the same gauntlets repeatedly, they'd be serving you sloppy sections. However, games with open objective structures get away with it. Let's explore how Tony Hawk makes it happen.

One explanation is that Neversoft uses game feel to make all movement teeth-clenchingly satisfying, regardless of whether you do it somewhere new or a spot you've already visited on your run. When you bake silky smooth kinetics into even the basic player abilities, like THPS does with its grinds, ollies, and the roll of the board, every moment is a feel-good moment. Add to that that it's always challenging to move in a coordinated fashion, and there is a problem for the player to solve wherever they go. Moving from A to B is not done just for the purpose of getting to B, the moving is something that can be done right or wrong. You can see the same principles in racing games as they make every tilt of your axles feel engaging and pose a challenge.

Yet, alone, having a movement model with sweet sensations is not enough for the player to experience tactile heaven. That's because players won't feel out their abilities and the aesthetics of those abilities, unless they have a goal or goals. In a spatial game like Tony Hawk, if we didn't have interactibles to move towards and formal objectives we could complete by interacting with those objects, there'd be less reason to shift our asses and experience how it feels to skate. Specific objectives in games even pipe us towards activities that have specific feels. For example, if you don't have the aim to collect five popcorn buckets in the Downtown map, you won't feel what it's like to fly off that quarter pipe to grab the bucket above the billboard. If you didn't need the maximum points possible in Burnside, you might not spend so much time exploring how to transfer between lips and extend your combos.

You can learn a ton about game design by thinking about this link between having a spatial goal and experiencing the movement mechanics. While we're here, I'll also mention that this covenant between basic modes of interaction and goals holds for systems that go beyond the environmental. In Stardew Valley, there'd be no reason to explore the rules of growing plants if we didn't have the goal of making money, restoring energy, and gaining experience from cultivation. In Trauma Center, there'd be no reason to suture wounds if we didn't have the goal of getting the patient's health under control.

To repeat a concept from earlier, designers can place interactables in levels with a mind for motivating players to return to the same parts of levels. Let's explore the different options designers have when they want a user to circle back to a spot:

1. They can have opponents in the level create an objective. I may return to the same corner of a map in a multiplayer shooter because players keep camping there. I might oscillate up and down the screen in Pong because my opponent hits the ball to a different Y coordinate on every volley.
2. Systems can spawn an objective on a point. In Snake, we might turn tail and slither back to a spot we've already covered because a juicy morsel of food appeared there. In the MMORPG Tibia, hordes of monsters will sometimes randomly show up and raid a city, rallying heroes to return to those cities and defend them. Not just any objective will do, however. We can retrace our steps in many Borderlands levels to find that Bandits and Skags have respawned, but going a second round with them isn't that worthwhile. There are no unique or sizeable rewards to be gained from it, and most of the point of defeating mobs in Borderlands is so you can move past them to get to the end of the level. Obviously, you're not doing that when you backtrack. Players will only magnetise to an objective they've already cleared if it is valuable to them.
3. Designers can have persistent interactables in the environment that stand up to repeated use. In the two numbered points above, the goal entities are expended when the player interacts with them. They are enemies that get killed, balls that get bounced back, food that gets eaten. Once the player has used up those entities, they will get a lot less out of looping back through that part of the level unless a new expendable interactable appears there. That's a big part of why backtracking in linear games feels undernourishing: there aren't expendable interactibles in your wake. A character or item does not have to disappear from its location to count as being "expended". For example, when you photograph a sight in Umurangi Generation, it's not destroyed, but there is a lot less reason to photograph it again because you can only complete the goal of snapping it once. With the techniques in points one and two, the designer responds to the problem of items being used up by spawning a new interactible, but what if the interactibles couldn't be exhausted?

The third idea is taken to heart in pinball, where hitting the same bumpers or rollovers switches multiple times in a row may still yield rewards. NPCs in RPGs are also enduring interactibles, always there to buy your vendor junk, no matter how many times you've sold them useless tin cans before. So it is in Tony Hawk where a curb or quarter pipe isn't destroyed if we've grinded on it or flipped off it before, and therefore, we have a reason to return to that portion of the park.

It's standard that when an interactable is non-perishable and relevant to the player, it only remains relevant as long as some other condition in the game state persists. For example, hitting the bumpers on a pinball table might only remain beneficial as long as a mission that requires hitting bumpers is active, or the RPG player will only want to visit the vendor if they have something to buy or sell. In THPS, we will only revisit an object if we've failed a direct goal involving it on this run (e.g. Nosegrab over the gap) or we are pursuing a higher score and tricking off the object would give us plenty of points. On the topic of points, you can see how the "Score X points" goals go a long way to making all props in the stages useful and recyclable. Tonky Honk uses a combination of formal goals targeting specific interactibles and formal goals for which any interactible can play a role.

I've found that when polled, Tony Hawk's fans often cite Downhill Jam as their least favourite level in the original game. It's a water slide to a checkered flag. That flag will shut down your run even if there's time left on the clock. I reckon Downhill Jam is a drag because it flouts the rules that an open objective structure should give you a non-linear level design and let you return to interactables. Where other levels let you pick your direction, this one stifles your freedom by picking one heading for you: forward and down. If you miss an interactable during the slalom, it's impossible or at least painful to return to it. Turned four valves, but not the fifth? It's as if you turned none of them at all. Collected S, K, A, and E but not T? Better luck next time, pal. The remake, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2, resets you back to the top of Downhill Jam once you hit base camp. However, even in this remake, the average travel time between objectives sucks.

Like Downhill Jam, Mall is roughly tunnel-shaped and optimised for forward thrust, but doesn't get as much flak. Does that make my theory about open layouts for open objective structures bunk? I don't think so because there are a couple of more atrial areas in Mall: one before the coffee grind and one just before the final leg, and Mall is still not as beloved as an exemplary open level like Warehouse or Foundry. It's telling that this linear stage structure was totally nixed for Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2.

THPS also needs the motif of returning to the same interactables habitually because it wants you to feel the pain of the neophyte skater. You will keep falling down the same stairway or vert like clockwork. Each time, you have to wipe the dirt from your knees, get back on the board, and try again. All sports require practice, but few enforce lessons using the sting that skateboarding does. We often recognise games as empowerment fantasies by those moments in which we succeed and feel strong for it. Yet, many empowerment games are also such because we can incur injuries that would put a real person in a full-body cast, but just momentarily suspend play in the virtual world.

Mind the Gaps

That's why Tony Hawk has non-expendable interactables, but how does it know where to place those objects? The distances between the interactibles in any game are informed by the movement properties of the player avatar. If a character moves quickly, you need more space in between items. If they move slowly, you need less space. If a character has a turning circle with a huge circumference, as we do in Tony Hawk, most areas of the stage must give you a wide berth. If we make smaller rotations, they can give us a smaller berth. I wish that in Pro Skater's Practice Mode, you could just rewind a few seconds to retry the same trick you just attempted because it's a faff to line yourself up again. Bam Margera turns like a semi truck.

When characters in games move in straight or gently curving lines, as they do in THPS, we are also forced to plan ahead and carefully consider the objects we'll run into. As these skaters, we must orient ourselves to hit combos of interactibles in a row. E.g. By jumping off a ramp onto a rail and then grinding that rail until we can ollie from it onto a bench. We must also check we're not going to plough headlong into walls or off ledges. After all, we cannot turn away from them at the last second.

The original PlayStation is not well optimised to those ends. The draw distance keeps you from seeing and, therefore, strategising too far ahead. The whole thing is like if Silent Hill hosted the X Games. The graphical memory upgrade in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2 didn't just heighten the realism but also extended your capacity for forethought. Fans of Tony Hawk often assess the quality of stages in terms of the "lines" they offer. I.e. The sequences of interactibles we can hit in a row, going in one rough direction on the map. In 1 + 2, we see more of each line as we travel it.

It's Tricky

The need to jump over and dodge obstacles, as well as connect with certain surfaces in your path, make Tony Hawk sound like a platformer. We could think of THPS as an endless runner, but in 3D. However, in a platformer, it's often enough to jump a gap or touch an entity, whether that touching involves standing on a platform, bopping a block from below, or dropping onto a Goomba from above. Where THPS deviates is that we are called to input button combinations during jumps and when making contact with surfaces. During a jump, we may grab or flip. When in contact with a surface, we may manual, grind, stall, etc.

As the game's events occur in real-time, it only makes sense that it explores that real-time element by giving us tricks that are momentary and of fixed length and tricks that are continuous and of variable length. In fact, we can describe the function of most moves in Tony Hawk by noting whether they are momentary or prolonged, as well as the surface on which we perform them. For our purposes, the air also counts as a surface. Just go with it.

For the uninitiated, a manual involves balancing on the two front or back wheels of the board while moving forward, and the longer the player tries this for, the harder it is for them to keep their balance. Manuals are not unlike grinds except that the player cares about balance between the nose and tail of the board rather than between their left and right side. Wall plants allow the player to kick off a wall and continue in the opposite direction. While in mid-air, reverts enable the player to orient themselves flat to a quarter or half pipe they just jumped from, potentially going from mid-air tricks to grinding the lip of the pipe. A player may also land from a vert and use a revert to add to their combo and reset their combo timer.

The above table is a reminder that player actions in games are not dictated solely by the available interactibles because players can have a choice of abilities to use in conjunction with an interactible. Yes, even if that interactible is fresh air. The trick system in THPS also helps us remember that "betting" in video games is more than wagering currency and usually happens implicitly rather than explicitly. Every time we encounter risk-reward dynamics, we are making a promise to a game about what points or resources we want to imperil in exchange for what potential payout. In Tony Hawk, we bet on how long we can hold a grab or keep a combo alive without bailing, or whether we can make another flip before we hit the ground.

This passive, rather than active, betting allows us to make wagers at a speed we couldn't if we needed to input the quantities for each bet or actively confirm every bet. Each frame we are manualing or grinding in Tony Hawk, we are agreeing to a heightened risk and a heightened reward. You couldn't make those decisions as quickly with a menu. In Tony Hawk, moves not only score points and smash goals, but also act as connectives between other moves. Manuals or reverts, for example, can link together flips, grabs, and stalls, a bit like how connectives can link together statement words in a sentence. An ability may be triggered not for its inherent value but because it gets you to the next interaction of value.

Level goals again prompt new interactions. If certain abilities weren't only usable in certain environments, you wouldn't need to use these connective tricks to extend your combo until you can make it to an environment in which you can perform the trick you want. E.g. Because I need extended hang time to make a grab, I might have a reason to manual, lengthening my combo until I can make it to a ramp. Geniuses will have noticed that many of the connective moves I mentioned didn't appear in the original Tony Hawk. In a typical video game industry story, Neversoft intended to include manuals in THPS 1, but they didn't make the cut due to production constraints and were held back until the sequel. The revert, as well as balance meters for the manuals and grind, didn't arrive until THPS 3. The wall plant or wall kick was all the way out on the remote island of Tony Hawk's Underground, the fifth game in the series. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2 was such a necessary game for the series because it retconned these more recent inventions back into the original two tours.

Turf Wars

You might be thinking that interactions between player and environment are technical enough that I can't find any sociopolitical implications behind them. You have vastly underestimated my pretentiousness. In skateboarding's rise to prominence, misfits who'd been pushed to the cultural outskirts were able to reclaim public places with four wheels and a plank of wood each. Where the grunge rockers of the 90s were disaffectedly checking out of traditional social environments, skateboarders were opting into them but on their terms, terms that social authorities disapproved of. The skater reserved the right to grind stair rails, ollie over planters, and generally cause a nuisance, all in the name of fun.

Skateboarders believe so much in fun that they'll fracture wrists, peel the skin off their back, or jump seventeen feet down a staircase just to feel a rush. This is why pop punk is the sound of skateboarding. It is the music of civil disobedience, but with a caffeinated goofiness. The original THPS comes together really nicely as a stylistic package because it captures the cultural accessories to skateboarding and not just the activity itself. By comparison, its remake doesn't always know how to command aesthetics to achieve the same summer vibe. From its brooding Arkhamqesque Downtown to the oppressive sunset over Venice Beach, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2 is that bit too serious. It's yet another example of how a blockbuster can dilute its character by believing the ideal for any game is to look like an Unreal Engine tech demo. THPS 3 + 4 corrects the record, ablaze with brighter and bolder hues.

Still, preserved in all these games' plasticine is the ownership that skateboarding gives us over our surroundings, whatever those surroundings may be. When a game's abilities require certain interactibles be present, it can narrow that game's scope to a few key locations. The fishing portions of Dave the Diver can only take place in a body of water teeming with sea creatures. There can only be Dead Space in those damned futuristic vessels where Isaac Clarke has inventory and upgrade stations to access. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but a Tony Hawk level can be almost anywhere: a campus, a mall, the seaside, Philadelphia. That range of settings exists for the same reason that the activity of skateboarding is adaptable to so many real-world locations. Skateboarding doesn't need coral reefs or complex equipment. All it needs is simple geometry: ramps, edges, and flat ground. Even when city councils are pulling all the benches and plants out of public places, these geometric primitives are much harder to get rid of, and so is skateboarding. Thanks for reading.

Notes

1. I took these objectives from Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2, not the original.