Tony Hawk's Underground

Tony Hawk's Underground brought to the Game Boy Advance a narrative shift for the series toward a simple story framework, in which the player's character, together with his friend Eric, builds a professional skateboarding career and gradually travels between several cities. Alongside classic point-scoring and completing tasks on individual maps, the game for the first time allowed players to get off the board and move around on foot, which opened up new ways to complete certain missions and gave the game's world a bit more credibility. The player can also create a custom rider and gradually customize their appearance and stats, while the choice between riding the board and walking on foot adds a variety to the missions that previous GBA entries in the series lacked.

The handheld version was again created by Vicarious Visions, which managed to maintain smooth performance and the clear graphics typical of the series' previous GBA entries even with story elements and a larger number of environments. The control scheme remained faithful to the series' established standard, so players familiar with previous entries didn't have to get used to anything new, and the game again included a multiplayer option via link cable. Individual cities are connected by short transition sequences that, even within the handheld's limitations, convey the sense of a journey toward a professional skateboarding career, and the minor side characters encountered in each location give the game's world a fragmented but functional story framework.

Underground on GBA was valued as a successful transfer of the more ambitious console concept to a handheld, albeit logically in a more compressed form than the cinematic cutscenes of the home versions. It helped the series maintain momentum on the go at the time and showed that even a story-oriented action sports game could work on a small screen. Today it offers an interesting look at the moment when the Tony Hawk series was trying to find a balance between arcade gameplay and storytelling, and on GBA it managed to do so surprisingly deftly.