That, too, is in the spirit of the original game, which Joyner calls something of a “music discovery platform.” Just as young gamers discovered their love of grunge and ’90s rap through “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater,” those picking up the remaster can dive into dozens of newer acts. He scoured the internet, he explains, and used everything from skate videos on YouTube to algorithms on streaming platforms like Spotify, and kept an Excel spreadsheet that categorized each song he picked to make sure he had a wide range of music genres.īut it was also important that, in addition to the heavy-hitters like Machine Gun Kelly, the soundtrack include plenty of up-and-comers. Joyner, a musician himself, says he poured over “probably thousands” of tracks to find the perfect ones for players to hit the old skate parks to. “And then it was basically like, fast forward 20 years and if this game were coming out today, what kind of music would we have? My whole philosophy was, well, let’s just add more of that, and get some more current stuff in there too.”

“I had to really first understand the original games and the original soundtracks, get a good sense for the genres that were incorporated into the original game,” he tells Variety. The end result is, as Joyner calls it, “the original soundtrack on steroids, basically.” But the team also added 37 new songs, ranging from older hits like A Tribe Called Quest’s 1990 classic “Can I Kick It?” to Machine Gun Kelly’s 2020 hit “My Bloody Valentine,” and spanning genres from punk to alternative to hip-hop. Unsurprisingly, getting most of those original songs back was “hugely important” for the developers, says Justin Joyner, senior sound designer at Vicarious Visions. Fans who are nostalgic for grinding for high combos to Naughty by Nature’s “Pin the Tail on the Donkey” or chasing down the letters of “SKATE” to Goldfinger’s “Superman” can still do just that.

Like so much of “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2,” the recently released remaster of the first two “Tony Hawk” games, the soundtrack captures the magic of the first two installments while adding some improvements.įor starters, Vicarious Visions and Activision Blizzard, the developer and publisher behind “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2,” managed to get back 22 of the songs from the original soundtracks, missing out on just a few tracks due to licensing issues.

Tony hawk pro skater 3 soundtrack list