Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4‘s Pinball Stage Is Cool as Hell

I got to play about an hour of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 during Summer Game Fest over the weekend, and hey: it’s good. It feels almost validating to see these skate park stages I spent endless hours on 20-plus years ago rebuilt to modern videogame standards, as if the game is telling me I didn’t actually waste all that time playing them when I was young, because it was all just valuable preparation for when I got to play them again, as a full adult—you know, when it really matters. Dropping back into these old levels was as instantly familiar and satisfying as it was with 2020’s Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2. But as much as I love to dwell on the past, I beelined straight to one of the game’s three new parks as soon as I had the controller in my hand. It’s a stage that combines one of my favorite videogame series with a pastime I might love even more than videogames: pinball.

Sure, I did perfunctory runs of some of the classic stages—Airport, Foundry, Suburbia—and popped into the new levels Movie Studio and Waterpark (not having Royal Trux’s “Waterpark” on the soundtrack so you can blast it throughout that park is such an unforced error). The whole time though I just kept thinking of the game’s third new stage, which instantly became my favorite in the history of Tony Hawk: the one where you skate around a pinball machine being played by a massive Tony Hawk himself. 

Pinball’s the best, of course, and I’ve got a half-dozen machines in my house (with a new one potentially on the way?) to prove it, so obviously I would immediately gravitate towards a pinball level in any videogame. The fact that it’s in what is otherwise a remake of two of the early Tony Hawk games—a series that tends to defuse my critical faculties while shamelessly capitalizing on my middle-aged yearning for younger, golder days—just makes the pull even stronger. And then consider the amazing synergies opened up by a skating game level within a pinball machine—grinding on rails, kickflipping off pop bumpers, spamming as many spins and tricks as possible while hurtling off the upper playfield—and, well, the result is something that seems laser-focused directly at me. Iron Galaxy Studios made the Pinball level of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 specifically, intentionally, perhaps even exclusively for me: and that’s especially true when Gang of Four’s “Damaged Goods” comes up on the soundtrack during this level. 

Fortunately Iron Galaxy doesn’t let this opportunity go to waste. They nail the concept, creating a level that’s both a rich, rewarding, possibility-filled Tony Hawk park, and a pinball game I’d totally play if it was real. It’s not a Tony Hawk-themed pin, although it does have a skating edge; the pin-within-the-game is called Skate of the Living Dead, and it’s basically what would happen if Skate or Die was Skate or Undie. Zombies return from the grave and start to shred while on the prowl for brains. The playfield has a ghastly neon green and brain tissue pink color scheme, with dark blues and purples representing the night sky on the walls, and the kind of comic book art still commonly seen on pins today. Zombie figurines lurk throughout the playfield, a chain of tombstones run alongside the back wall (perfect for grinding, natch), and wire rails give it all a sense of verticality while also reinforcing the pinball theme. There are only a couple of Tony Hawk references on the playfield itself: one is a drop target shaped like a tombstone with his name on it, and another is an on-field target shaped like his signature Birdhouse skull logo.