Tony Hawk almost signed with another skating game before his Activision deal
Bird shares the word
The Tony Hawk franchise of games is definitely one of the most successful collaborations in gaming. Hawk’s name gave Activision’s skateboarding series some major credibility, and the game itself helped propel Hawk to a whole new level of popularity. That’s why it’s crazy to learn it almost didn’t happen.
On an episode of The Diary of a CEO podcast, Hawk opened up about the deal he made with Activision for their series of games. It turns out Hawk was actually already talking to another company about representing their game, and had Activision reached out just a few months later, they would have missed their opportunity.
You can see Tony detail the situation below via a transcript from Videogames Chronicle.
“There was another group doing a game that had contacted me and I went down the road with them a little bit. I realized that what they were trying to do was so much more, it was more technically difficult to play because they were trying to truly emulate skating.
I felt like I understood that approach, but at the same time skating wasn’t that big when we released this game or when we were going to release this game, and I wanted something that would be more friendly to the non-skater to play, to understand, to be able to just pick up and start doing tricks.
When I saw what Activision had, they had a very early version of a skater doing tricks, the way it moved, and to me it was intuitive, it was perfect, it was like right away I started playing it, I started doing tricks, it was almost like it was it was an extension of my body to start doing this on that screen with that skater, and something innately felt right about it to me.
And so, was there a close call? I would say if Activision maybe had called me a month or two later, I might have already inked a deal, so um, but I felt very lucky.”
Add Comment
mauroh
1y agoThat would've been confusing, to say the least!
Imagine your grandma getting you that new Tony Hawk game, but NOT the right one, the one with Tony Hawk in the name, but not anywhere IN the game? Glad he signed with the one that already had his name on it! Confusion avoided!
Comments (1)