In an interview with Diary of CEO, host Steven Bartlett asks Tony Hawk if there were any “close calls.” Hawk responds to Barlett stating when he was considering another deal before closing with Activision Blizzard, “There was another group doing a game that had contacted me and I went down the road with them a little bit and realized what they were trying to do was so much more technically difficult to play because they were trying to truly emulate skating.”
Hawk stated that he felt like that approach is understandable but at the time skating wasn’t popular during the planned release. Hawk had then demoed what would be 1999’s Tony Hawk Pro Skater game with Activision.
“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. Like right away I started playing it, started doing tricks, it was almost like an extension of my body. To start doing this on the screen with that skater it’s something innately that felt right to me. So was there a close call? I would say if Activision maybe had called me a month or two later, I might have already linked a deal,” said Hawk.
Before the launch of the game there had already been positive comments from the game publishers. “They knew they had a good game overall. They felt a surge of interest and so they offered me a buyout of future royalties right before the game launched. At the time, they offered me half-a-million dollars… For me having lived through some really lean times, when they say half-a-million dollars to me it sounds like a billion dollars,” said Hawk.
“I felt very lucky to have my name synonymous with a video game and with skateboarding because I had devoted my life to it… To have that success, especially in video games is reserved for someone like Madden or Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto. To have it be your name was wild…There has been a whole generation of kids, and I’m not kidding, that had asked me if I was named after a video game,” said Hawk.
Tony Hawk Pro Skater and the legacy games had made over $1.4 billion in revenue according to Diary of a CEO’s Bartlett.