Tony Hawk's Underground

Tony Hawk's Underground marked a fundamental shift for the series toward story - the player created their own character and progressed through a career from amateur to professional skateboarder, accompanied by cutscenes and collaboration with real riders from the actual scene. It was now possible to hop off the board and move around on foot, opening up new possibilities for interacting with the environment and completing tasks beyond classic skateboard tricks and competitions. More open cities replaced the earlier closed levels, giving players a genuine sense of traveling between the career's individual locations, including nighttime outings for tagging and minor vandalism.

On Xbox, the game offered vast city environments like New York or Tampa that could be freely traversed not just on a skateboard but also by car during special tasks and nighttime excursions. A character and trick editor let players customize the appearance and moves of their own character, extending the game's lifespan well beyond the main career alone. The soundtrack again drew on punk and hip-hop music, which became an inseparable part of the series' atmosphere and accompanied players through every attempt at a new trick.

Underground was both a commercial and critical success and confirmed that the series could grow beyond a purely sports-focused approach toward a more pronounced plot and the player's personal career. The emphasis on story and a more open environment influenced the direction of the entire brand for several years to come, as well as competing sports titles that tried to use a similar formula to reach a younger audience. Today, the game stands as an interesting milestone in the history of skateboarding games, when the genre tried to find a balance between arcade fun and deeper player investment in a character and their story, and many players remember it as their first contact with the skateboarding genre altogether.

Why play it: For players who want to experience the moment when the skateboarding genre first combined arcade fun with story and a personal career, offering many their first contact with the skateboarding genre.