The Tony Hawk's Pro Skater gaming franchise, much like Tony himself, did much to popularize skateboarding with its approachable, anarchic, arcadey take on the sport. But in 2003, developer Neversoft were feeling ambitious. The previous game, Pro Skater 4, was the first to feature an open level structure and individual missions given by NPCs. The next level from that? Put in an actual story. And wouldn't you know it, it's actually pretty good.
Tony Hawk's Underground is the first narrative-driven game in the franchise, following the journey of your created player character from New Jersey nobody to famous pro skater, with several actual pros popping in to provide some color, all anchored by one of gaming's most vile antagonists...
And also you can get off the board and run around and climb around and my god is it a useful safety net. Still pretty jank game though.
The LP
This is a straightforward run through the game on Sick difficulty. I won't be doing all of the missions since some of them are just insurmountable on Sick, but I will be getting all of the secret tapes, levels, etc at the end of the LP.
I'm joined on co-commentary by JigglyJacob, a fellow old fan of the Tony Hawk games, and he's more recently taken up skateboarding himself in real life, so he may have additional insights that I may not. Our player character, Tiddy, also originates from his WarioWare LPs, which are highly recommended viewing: [Smooth Moves|Gold]
Spoiler Policy
While the game was pretty popular in its time, there's probably plenty of people here who haven't played it and don't know the story, so avoid discussing or hinting at events that haven't happened in the LP yet.
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