Neversoft Was Onto Something Great In The Small Town “Tony Hawk’s Project 8″
Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland made a lot of noise about being the first “Open World” Tony Hawk game when it was being advertised and shown off, but if you’re an avid fan of the series you know as well as I do that claim was mostly buzzwords. The game was full of obvious level boundaries, long bland tunnels meant to hide load times and, despite it’s grand ideas of an open world, always felt restrictive and linear when it came to where you could actually go. Project 8 only briefly got spoken about in these terms, due to them having already been used so heavily, which I find incredibly unfair as it actually fulfilled the American Wasteland’s promise and will never get the credit it deserved for it. Instead of shooting for the stars and recreating a major urban metropolis like L.A, Project 8 scaled everything back and created a small town almost supernaturally built for skating, without fear of looking real enough or enough like a well known place. In doing so Neversoft successfully created an actual open world with no obvious boundaries or loading zones like the ones that plagued American Wasteland, and revitalized an aging series, if just for a short time. To say that the town in Tony Hawk’s Project 8 felt like a “real place” would sound absurd in the same way saying any Tony Hawk level felt like a “real place”, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t use its small town setting to expert effect. It more comes off as some kind of elaborate skate park of a town that’s mimicking things you may find in small town America, twisting and changing anything it needs to in order to make for the best possible skate lines and the maximum amount of fun. The rooftops of downtown are dominated by empty pools and ramps positioned just right to launch you up to the power lines. The school down the road is set up in a way that facilitates skating 1000% more than it does learning. Even the city hall, as ridiculously grand and statuesque as it is, is little more than a facade featuring a large empty pool for with which to bust combos to your hearts content.
In a way the town in Project 8 was like something of an amalgamation of every kind of level that worked well in Tony Hawk prior to this game in the series. Imagine then, if all those classic levels flowed into each other in a way that allowed you start a combo in the iconic School II and end it in the traditional skate-park of Burnside. While those names and layouts aren’t actually there, the locations in Project 8 evoke them wonderfully, and the possibility of carrying your combo between them is a reality, with far more than one way to carry your combo between them, not just via the rigid tunnels in American Wasteland. It creates a sense of cohesion the game that marketed itself as “open world” crucially lacked, and in doing so becomes what is very likely the most charming location in the series.
It’s a huge shame Tony Hawk as a franchise had to die the way it did, even the very next game in the series, Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground, fell back into the trap of trying to go too big with it’s recreations of large East Coast cities linked together by narrow bridges. I feel had Neversoft stuck to the idea of small, detailed areas as they’d shown they could do so well in Project 8, we could still see Tony Hawk games today. Alas, the Birdman’s wings have been clipped, and we’re all just going to have to make do with Skate 4.....eventually....probably....maybe.
