When it comes to the topic of titles that push the Game Boy Advance hardware, one game that constantly comes up is Vicarious Vision's Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2, and it's easy to see why.
Released as a launch title for the console in June 2001 in North America (and June 22nd in Europe), the game was an impressive adaptation of the popular PlayStation skateboarding title, which managed to surpass people's expectations. Tasked with creating something that emulated the 3D gameplay of the PlayStation original, Vicarious Visions didn't end up shying away from the challenge, opting not to produce a simple sidescroller similar to Natsume's earlier Game Boy Color port. Instead, the studio decided to split the difference, settling upon an isometric viewpoint featuring a real-time rendered 3D character that ran on much of the same source code as the original.
At the time, it's safe to say that the vast majority of journalists and gamers were pretty blown away at what Vicarious Visions had managed to pull off, with many of them believing that Nintendo's new device had only been capable of outputting 2D sprite-based graphics. Because of this, it went on to receive some incredible reviews from publications like IGN, Gamespot, and Next Generation, in addition to winning several awards (including a BAFTA for "Best Mobile Interactive Game") and spawning a bunch of other games using the same technology and approach.
So, with all that in mind, we felt it was about time to do a proper deep dive into the development of what is now considered a handheld classic and look at some of the challenges Vicarious Visions faced and how it overcame them. So we reached out to Matt Conte, the lead programmer on the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 port, who was happy to go into detail about how the game was made, and even gave us some info on Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3, which he also worked on.
New Hardware, New Challenges
According to the previous accounts we've come across, Vicarious Visions first had the idea of making a Tony Hawk's game when work on their Game Boy Color Spiderman title for the publisher Activision was winding down.
In April 2000, Nintendo had presented the company with a bunch of AGB devkits for developing games for the as-yet-to-be-released Game Boy Advance handheld, which had led Vicarious Visions to come up with a list of potential games it could create for the handheld.
According to Vicarious Visions CEO Karthik Bala in a 2001 IGN interview, the studio considered working SNES ports, Mode 7-style racers, and other similar titles, but eventually someone suggested making a port of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 for the handheld instead. This ended up capturing people's imagination, with different members of the studio getting excited over what this might look like. So the decision was made to try and go after the license.
By this point in time, Vicarious Visions already had a close relationship with Activision, thanks to working on Spiderman, but those inside the studio knew that getting to work on Tony Hawk would likely prove to be difficult. The publisher considered Tony Hawk to be one of its crown jewels and wasn't about to just give it out to anyone. So, as a result, Vicarious Vision's CEO Karthik Bala came up with a plan during E3 in May 2000 to have the lead artist Andy Lomerson create a bunch of mockups of what a Tony Hawk game could look like using the AGB hardware.
The intention was then to fax these over to Bala at the event and to present them to Tony Hawk on the show floor. That way Tony Hawk and Activision would be able to see for themselves what a game could look like, without having to spend any funds towards its development.
Speaking about how the team arrived at this isometric view, Conte states, "We kind of sat down and said, ‘Well, how can we translate this to GBA in a way that feels authentic?’ Because we didn’t want to rewrite the entire game. So we started formulating a plan of ‘Okay, there’s no way we can make a full 3D representation. We can’t emulate what’s happening on PSX.’ So we kind of settled on this projection which we felt could give most of the feeling of the level layouts and access to most of the level components.
"Even if you took all of the levels and flipped them so you were looking at a top-down perspective, most of the level geometry and all of the level components are accessible in that view. So we felt that the isometric projection would work especially well given the tile-based graphics system on the Game Boy Advance. So that would be a good approach forward."
Remarkably, this canny bit of self-promotion managed to work, and Activision ended up striking a handshake agreement with the studio to develop the port of the game by the end of the event. After some formalities, development officially began a few months later, in August 2000, with the team diving headfirst into the project to try to make a game that felt worthy of the Tony Hawk name.
As this was the studio's first Game Boy Advance title, the team didn't have an advanced engine with a sophisticated level editor on hand. Instead, everything was mostly handled by math, with the programmers on the project having to manually set the point values for tiles in the environment to give them the desired amount of depth. This would allow them to create the simple level geometry.
"We obviously didn't have the computational ability or the memory or the ROM budget to build an entire 3D polygonal world," says Conte. "So, the way that the engine worked was basically a height map. So if you took the isometric projection and you rotated it so that you're just looking at a grid from like top down, for every particular point that you could choose, you would say X, Y, and then you would get a Z value. You'd get a height.
"And the way that we did that was using parametric functions. So, you know, if you were on a flat plane, it was simple. You would just say z is 0 or z is 10 or something like that. For a quarter pipe, it was a quadratic equation. So we would try and approximate the curvature based on x, y and we would find out the z based on this quadratic equation."
As for the skater, the team also found themselves having to write new software, to achieve the 3D effect they wanted. Originally, while putting together the initial mockups, they had been intending to use digitized sprites for the project. These are pre-rendered 3D models that have been converted into sprites before being implemented in the game. However, once they had access to Neversoft's source code, they soon realized that the number of individual frames of animation for the various tricks and maneuvers was somewhere in the thousands and it wouldn't be possible to store all that on a single GBA cartridge. Instead, the team would have to come up with another solution.
"We just did the math and we said, ‘Okay if we’re going to allow you to go omnidirectional in this isometric world, there is no room on the cartridge for us to store every single frame of those 5000 frames at 8 or 16 or 32 arbitrary directions.’ So the other programmer, Alex [Rybakov], had some experience with some real-time 3D rendering back in the day, on PC games, and so he spent maybe a month or a month and a half prototyping a real-time renderer that was Gouraud shaded. So it wasn’t flat-shaded.
"So in pretty short order, we had a prototype of a 3D render that would work within, I believe, a 64x64 sprite that we could then layer on top of the game field." Discovering how to render the skater wasn't the end of the problems, however.
Animation, Music, & Recapturing The Magic
As Conte tells us, there was also the issue of how to emulate the feel of the classic Tony Hawk games on the Nintendo handheld.
In its initial planning, Vicarious Visions had intended to reuse much of the original Neversoft source code, to ensure the experience felt as close to the PlayStation version as possible, but Neversoft's source code was almost entirely written in C++ and Nintendo had stated in the official documentation accompanying the AGB dev kit that the device could only be coded in C. Because of this, Conte had to convince Nintendo it was possible to develop for the console to run C++, or risk having to convert everything over himself.
"I was like, 'I'm not gonna port however many hundred thousands of lines of code over to sort of a precursor language,'" he tells us. "So, I put together a proof of concept and made it work on the GBA. And I ended up giving sort of a presentation to them, which became a blog post on their internal site about, 'Here's how you can make C++ work on the GBA'. So with that sort of out of the way, we could then start on actually porting the bulk of the PSX code over to the GBA."
According to Conte, reusing the code was one of the key reasons why the physics in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 feels so accurate to the original. This apparently didn't just apply to the physics either, with Conte stating that much of the "trick script" Neversoft wrote was also repurposed for the handheld version.
"Trick script was basically a very rudimentary scripting language that they gave their designers to design the tricks and it was like super simple commands such as start this animation or play a sound if you do a nutter. And the interesting thing with TrickScript was that it was actually converted into a binary language, which was created by the PlayStation 1 assembler. So this is what PSX programmers would use to create assembly language binaries.
"And then in the runtime, like in the actual code, there was like a C++ code that would basically decode that. It was basically like byte code. It would read a byte and then start a trick and see this is the point value or, you know, this is the length of the trick and it would just sort of like loop through that. So, to basically shortcut the process of converting all that over, I just took the PlayStation assembler executable and used that to create a binary. So we're basically using PlayStation tools to create byte code that we would then execute on the GBA."
With the team gradually overcoming most of the technical hurdles in their way, there was still another pressing question that needed to be answered: how the music in the game would be handled.
The Tony Hawk's Pro Skater games were at that point well known for their use of licensed bands. However, using pre-existing recordings was simply not possible on the handheld as there wouldn't be enough room on the cartridge to store all of the sampled tracks. Because of this, Vicarious Visions reached out to the German composer and former demoscener Manfred Linzner, who had previously collaborated with the studio on Spiderman to see what he could come up with.
"I forget even how much the cartridge ROM was on Tony 2 but we knew that we weren't gonna be able to do like full sample tracks," says Conte. "I think some other titles came out later that were able to use sample tracks, but like we just didn't have the space given all the level data and the animation data we were gonna be eating up.
"So we basically approached Manfred and said you know 'We would like you to kind of create like a pastiche like like like songs that are in the style of Tony Hawk tracks.' And like, it's kind of nice in the Tony series there isn't a particular track that is associated with a particular level. Most of the work that I had done with him before, like on the Spider-Man game, was 'Okay, you're down in the sewer, you need kind of like this eerie kind of sound.' But this time we just said, 'We have the space on the cartridge for you to build these songs. Here are the tracks from the original soundtrack and here are some other songs that we kind of picked ourselves from skate punk-type artists. Try and build something similar.'
The result of this collaboration was a 10-song soundtrack that includes plenty of distortion-heavy skate-punk tracks, as well as a couple of funkier hip-hop-inspired tunes. These work together to capture the spirit of the original and are all available to be selected from the pause menu at any time, regardless of the current level.
The Road To Release & Creating A Legacy
As all of the different components were coming together, Vicarious Visions started compiling builds to send over to the Activision QA team to test, but the initial feedback wasn't quite as enthusiastic as what the team had been expecting. In fact, Activision's workers heavily criticized the level layouts, believing that while the game certainly looked the part and was technically impressive, it was lacking some of the purposeful level design that had been present in the original PS1 title.
As Conte recalls, "We had started sending it to Activision's QA team. And they had a team that was entirely focused on Tony Hawk, and the Tony Hawk series. So like these guys played Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 like all day, every day, as their job. And so, we gave them an early version to get some feedback about it and they tore it apart.
"They were like, 'This is all wrong.' Like the technology's great, things look great, but 'You guys don't understand how to build levels at all.' And we basically brought them on full-time, kind of as consultants, to help us understand the language of what makes a Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 level. Like how this rail has to line up with that funbox and how you create these lines. Everything is set up with a purpose in the PlayStation levels and we had kind of missed that in our attempt to recreate the looks of the levels in the isometric projection and moving stuff around."
Because of this, the team ended up going through all of the levels again to give them another pass, paying particular attention to how they rewarded high-level play and creating better lines to allow players to chain together a greater combination of tricks on the fly. This turned out to be one of the final ingredients, in their quest to make the game feel just as satisfying as the original.
All in all, the game took less than a year to develop from the very start of production to when it finally hit store shelves in June 2001 and was greeted upon release with a ton of enthusiastic press from video game journalists. For the team, this was a major relief, but not entirely surprising as they knew that what they had set out was unlike anything else on the system.
Conte states, "We knew that with it being a launch title, there was not a whole lot else on the plate, to begin with, and the quality usually evolves from what launches on day zero versus a few years into its lifetime. So I don't think we were super surprised at the response. It also had the Tony Hawk IP attached to it, and Tony was huge at that time. So it felt like a winning combination."
In the aftermath of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2, Vicarious Visions later ended up updating and reusing its 3D renderer for various other projects it was working on, including Crash Bandicoot: The Huge Adventure, Jet Grind Radio, and Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3. In the case of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3, one of the biggest changes was the creation of an actual 3D-level editor, to allow the developers to design stages more intuitively.
Speaking about this editor, Conte recalls, "It looked like what Unity or something looks like today. You could rotate everything around, and place a rail from here to there. You could set up where the gaps were. You could set up the points where the escape letters were. All that stuff. So that was all custom built."
In addition to this, there were other changes too, with the character no longer being Gouraud shaded, but texture-mapped instead. This allowed the team to implement features like more detailed clothing and a create-a-skater option, whereby players could tweak the attire of existing skateboarders or create their very own character from scratch. The team also introduced 4-player multiplayer using the link cable (a feature that had been removed from the previous game during development), allowing players to experience games like H-O-R-S-E, Tag, King of the Hill, and Trick Attack.
Similar to its predecessor, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 ended up receiving some stellar reviews from video game outlets, with IGN awarding it a 9.6 out of 10, calling it "an incredible package" and "a lot deeper than you're led to believe". Meanwhile, Gamespot gave it a 9.5, stating it was perhaps "the only Game Boy Advance game to truly usurp Tony Hawk 2".
Following Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3's release, Vicarious Visions inevitably went on to work on more Game Boy Advance ports of Tony Hawk's console games, contributing to pretty much all of them except 2006's Downhill Jam, which was handled by the company Visual Impact (Vicarious Visions would be tasked instead with creating Downhill Jam's Nintendo DS port). Its relationship with Tony Hawk didn't stop there either, with the company later developing Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2 for PCs and consoles in 2020.
Today, whenever anyone mentions Vicarious Visions' Tony Hawk Pro Skater games for the Game Boy Advance in conversation, it's usually accompanied by total disbelief at what the studio managed to achieve with the limited hardware that was available to them. The games remain highly playable to this day and are still some of the best action sports titles that are available for the handheld.