There are few games that were more formative during my upbringing than the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series. It's funny, really. My most memorable moments were downloading the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 demo and playing that religiously until I got the full game in my hands. It was a pretty bare-bones demo, too. You got a two-minute skate session on Marseille, and you could only choose from two skaters: Tony Hawk and Kareem Campbell. I still hear B-Boy Document '99 as I pull off tricks that I could only dream of pulling off in real life. And of course, one of the best parts about the PC version was that it included three levels from the first game—sure, Downhill Jam isn't great, but man, Warehouse is as classic as 1-1 is to Mario.
As you can tell I'm pretty passionate about this series, particularly the second game. That's why I'm interested in Pretending I'm a Superman: The Tony Hawk Video Game Story. It's a documentary that recently hit Indiegogo, and it's already got interviews with skaters like Tony Hawk and Rodney Mullen and developers who worked on the early games. Former Neversoft producer Ralph D'Amato is producing the documentary, while Ludvig Gür (aka Icebears4ever on YouTube) is directing. Gür is a noted Tony Hawk fan and has made a bunch of videos around the series, including a History of Tony Hawk Games Documentary.
The campaign is asking for $75,000 to help finish production on the documentary. At the time of publishing, the crowdfunding campaign has raised a little short of $8,000 with about a month left. If you want to be able to stream the feature before it's officially released, you'll have to pay $15, while a version you can download requires you to pay $30—the $30 tier also gets your name in the credits. There are a bunch of different rewards you can get for paying even more, with $7,000 getting you everything in the previous tiers, a session with Tony Hawk, and $1,000 donated to the Tony Hawk Foundation in your name.
You can check out the Indiegogo campaign for yourself here.
As for new Tony Hawk video games, the Birdman has said that he is in talks with a developer for a new game that won't be published by Activision. The last game, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5, wasn't available on PC, but it also was not very good at all. Fingers crossed that the next game is both good and on PC.
