This year the Tony Hawk franchise has some real competition in the form of EA's Skate. At Games Convention 2007 our friends at Pro-G caught up with Chad Findley, project lead on Tony Hawk's Proving Ground, to find out what lies ahead for the hugely successful skating series.
Pro-G: The Tony Hawk franchise has been around and successful for years. Why do you think it's managed to remain at the forefront of gaming for so long?
CF: I think there are a couple of reasons why. The first being skating culture, it's huge. There are so many stories, so many things you can do to excel. This allows us to have the freedom to move our game into different areas every single year so we can make it fresh and new.
The other side is that we are really just making a fun, fun game. You can go totally sim, you can go totally arcade. Our main thing is to take the best of both and to make a good fun game out of it that has challenges so you have to better yourself, get good at it, and eventually accomplish it.
Pro-G: Nail the Trick was the big new feature in Project 8. What have you done this year to expand on that?
CF: I was working on GUN while Project 8 was getting done and I came in at the end and tried Nail the Trick. I'm kind of a physics geek so I really like that; it was really cool to have that total control.
In Proving Ground we've broken down skaters into three classes: career skaters, hardcore skaters and rigger skaters. Depending on which story you take you'll learn different abilities. If you go down the career route you'll learn Nail the Trick, Nail the Grab and Nail the Manual. With Nail the Trick we gave players total control - the left stick controls your left foot, your right stick controls you right foot. You can do under flips, impossible shove its - whatever you want to create with it, you can.
Now with Nail the Grab, if you hold down the left trigger, your left stick controls your left arm and your right stick controls your right arm. So you can grab the board on the front rail or back rail, the tail or the nose; you can tweak it off in any direction; if you do a quarter turn on the stick you'll actually do a finger flip and you have to catch it back at the right time to land it again.
