Canceled Skate or Die Reboot's Influence on Tony Hawk series

[mwb37]

A new article on Unseen64 talks about how EA Games commissioned Criterion Games to develop a Skate or Die reboot for Xbox and Playstation 2 in 2002.  The game would have allowed you to get off your board and walk; a feature that was not included in a Tony Hawk game until the 2003 release of Tony Hawk's Underground.  It was also planned to feature skate shops that you could walk into and buy boards, like in Tony Hawk's American Wasteland.  There is a good chance that Neversoft was inspired by the planned features for this game.  It may have even inspired the changes that took place between Pro Skater 3 and Pro Skater 4, since talking to pedestrians to start goals was one of the planned features for the Skate or Die reboot, prior to the release of Pro Skater 4.

I'm not sure if anything was publicly known about the Skate or Die reboot at its time of development, but it sounds like the developers at Criterion were pretty angry at EA because of their unrealistic demands.  Criterion may have shared their work with Neversoft out of spite for the way EA was treating them, or they may have just wanted their work to live on in some form.

https://www.unseen64.net/2017/06/20/skate-die-reboot-xbox-ps2-cancelled/

[thedodeman]

I love stuff like this- great article! I have often wondered how many various ideas/concepts surrounding skateboarding games have come and gone over the years. I would have loved to have seen this idea come to fruition as I played Skate or Die on Commodore 64 (yes, I'm that darn old). I often wondered why they never made a follow-up to 720, as that was a pretty popular arcade game.

Other thoughts along these lines: what was Neversoft working on after Proving Ground? I talked to the devs in-person at the THPG media event and they assured me they were working on some killer stuff for the next THPS title, but the plug got pulled on that next title as they shifted to 100% Guitar Hero development. I wonder if Black Box ever started dev for Skate 4? Same with another title for Grind Session or Thrasher Skate and Destroy. I bet there were multiple games that got dev started on them and they were never finished due to publishers pulling the plug on them. I would bet some really cool ideas were in those various games, but we'll likely never know...