Hollywood legend Bruce Willis and equally legendary pro skateboarder Tony Hawk share a unique, odd relationship in a place you wouldn’t expect. Strap in for the unusual story of how Bruce Willis changed the game, literally, for celebrities and video games, and how this in turn helped in the creation of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.
The Rise and Almost Fall and Rise of Neversoft
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater for the PS1 helped popularize an entire sport, changed culture as we know it, turned Tony Hawk into a household name, and sold millions of copies. However, before any of that ever happened, you had a developer that was struggling to keep the lights on by the time they agreed to work on an Activision game called Apocalypse in 1998.
Founded in 1994 in the wake of Malibu Interactive’s demise, Neversoft spent their formative years developing a game based on the Skeleton Warriors TV series for first the Sega Genesis, and then eventually the Saturn. From 1995 to 1997, the company experienced rapid growth, with over 20 people on the payroll by 1996, only to then endure some rapid, tumultuous changes. “We weren’t very well-organized and we had a bunch of talented people,” founding member Mick West once said. “We were all kind of bouncing around and didn’t have a strong schedule.”
The first blow came when a game based on the Marvel hero Ghost Rider was canceled, with publisher Crystal Dynamics getting as far as showcasing a demo before shelving the release entirely.
It got worse. In 1997, Sony cancelled a project Neversoft had been working on for nearly a year, that at one point went from being called Big Guns to Exodus. At the same time, Neversoft found their efforts to port MDK from the PC to the PS1 taking far longer than they had anticipated. The engine Neversoft developed during this time proved invaluable for the work involved in porting that game, and it was the most significant bargaining chip the company had as it faced an uncertain future.
That uncertain future changed rather quickly, when the company struck a deal with Activision to effectively rescue an action game called Apocalypse. A game featuring Bruce Willis as your in-game sidekick had begun its existence as an in-house Activision project, but the development branch at Santa Monica and the publisher soon found themselves in over their heads. The game was simply not coming together, but Activision had put a lot of time and resources towards the project, seeing no choice but to see it finished by someone external.
If it hadn’t been for Activision signing Bruce Willis for an estimated $2 million, it seems likely that Apocalypse would have simply been cancelled. Fortunately for Neversoft, that was not the case.
Welcome to the Video Game Party, Pal
After exploding to popularity in the 1980s on the strength of the iconic TV series Moonlighting and the massively influential action blockbuster Die Hard, Bruce Willis found himself dealing with a chaotic career as the 1990s began. Die Hard 2 aside, the first half of the 90s had Willis appearing in high-profile bombs like Bonfire of the Vanities, Hudson Hawk, Color of Night and North, with films like The Last Boy Scout and Striking Distance being considered underperformers.
However, by 1997, the point in which Willis signed a revolutionary deal with Activision for Apocalypse, the Hollywood action hero’s career was on much firmer ground, owing to a string of hits that outweighed the failures, including Pulp Fiction, Die Hard with a Vengeance, and 12 Monkeys. In the same year he signed the deal with Activision, both The Jackal and The Fifth Element would be released to great commercial success. By the time the game actually came out in 1998, Willis was considered highly bankable. It wasn’t surprising that Activision would want him in the first place.
What was surprising was that Willis was open to Activision’s offer.
Before Bruce Willis agreed to lend much more than just his name and face for Apocalypse, with the actor agreeing to motion capture and voiceover work for the game, celebrities and video game deals came down to endorsements and occasionally likeness rights. Bruce Willis accepted not only profit participation in Activision but received an equity interest in the company in addition to an undisclosed fee. The deal and subsequent production of the game went far beyond Mike Tyson lending his face to Punch-Out!! or Alan Alda hawking Atari consoles in the early 80s.
Regardless of how the game actually performed, Apocalypse was seen as a turning point in both the entertainment and video game industries. “Companies like Microsoft are getting greater access to talent,” an undisclosed source told Variety in 1997. “The payment will have to come in unique forms, but we’ll see more deals like this start to happen.”
That suspicion would prove true, and particularly beneficial to Neversoft as they began production on Apocalypse.
Apocalypse: Production and Release
“We nearly failed as a company just before Apocalypse,” Mick West said. “When we found Apocalypse and got that going, we recognized Activision was good at giving us money, and so, yeah, it was something that kept the stability within Neversoft for the foreseeable future.”
Taking full advantage of Apocalypse’s potential to pull the company out of oblivion, Neversoft went to work on the game by effectively throwing out everything save for a couple of small things. By the time they came on board, Activision had eliminated the concept of Bruce Willis as an AI buddy who would offer quips, suggestions, and the occasional explosion of gunfire, and opted instead to simply star Bruce Willis as a lone hero going up against a lunatic scientist and his genetically-engineered Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
With Wills’ footage already completed in early 1997, before they even became involved, Neversoft built their game around the material they had, which wasn’t limited to Bruce Willis’ work. Activision had also cast popular singer Poe in the role of Willis’ girlfriend Mary Magdelene, transformed into the horrifying demon Plague. Poe had a certified gold record under her belt with the successful 1995 alternative album Hello.
Poe would not only play a significant role in the game’s story, but would also contribute an exclusive remix of her song “Control”, the original of which would eventually appear on her 2000 album Haunted. System of a Down’s song “War” was featured prominently on a billboard in Apocalypse, and it’s worth noting that the song was used in the game just as the band was rising to prominence. This wouldn’t be the last time Neversoft had their finger on the pulse of the new music scene.
Neversoft raced to get the game ready for a November 1998 release, and would finish Apocalypse on time, released in the fall of 1997 to good-not-great reviews and decent sales. It’s a solid shot of dated fun, if you really want to check it out for yourself.
Activision proved to be happy with Neversoft from nearly the beginning. Although Apocalypse in of itself didn’t exactly change the world, Activision offered Neversoft a chance to develop with relative freedom a skateboarding game. Eager to keep the momentum going, Neversoft agreed even as their resources were straining to finish Apocalypse. It was because of this strain that Neversoft would be forced to use what they had to present a demo to Activision. The decision to repurpose Apocalypse assets for a skateboarding game prototype would have enormous implications on not only the game itself, but on the future of its eventual star Tony Hawk — and pop culture at large.
Bruce Willis Wins Over Tony Hawk
“My life seemed like it had some potential again, in terms of my career,” Tony Hawk would say in a retrospective interview with IGN in 2019.
By 1996, after struggling to remain relevant as the sport of skateboarding itself was finally beginning to turn itself around with events like the X-Games debuting in 1995, Hawk was enjoying more professional success than he had in years. Unfortunately, as Hawk himself would say, he was “Still just getting by.”
Simply making it to the mid-90s with a family and diminishing public interest in the sport of his dreams was one thing. What Tony Hawk needed by the middle of the decade was a chance to not only move his career to a new level, but also something that would elevate skateboarding as a whole. It’s an interesting parallel to Neversoft, who had gone through their own rough period during the same time, arriving as they also did at a point where something dramatic needed to happen to move the needle somewhere worthwhile.
It was a matter of perfect, almost cosmic timing, that Neversoft was working on a unique approach to a skateboarding video game.
As Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater lead artist Silvio Porretta recalls “Nobody had done a skateboarding game before to the scale we were doing it so it was foreign territory. Tony Hawk was not involved at the beginning, so we were trying different things to make it work.” Early skateboard games like 720, California Games, or arguably the most famous title up to that point, Skate or Die, didn’t offer much help to Neversoft. It was their intention to go in a direction that emphasized arcade-style play over something along the lines of a simulation.
“We decided to make the game more fun,” Silvio Porretta said, “So that’s why it was never a realistic simulation of skateboarding. That was key to the success of the game.”
Recent, relatively unsuccessful games like Sega’s Top Skater and EA’s Street Sk8er also weren’t quite what Neversoft had in mind, although Porretta did mention Top Skater in particular. “There was a Top Skater machine at the bowling alley across the street from Neversoft, so we played a ton of sessions on that. It was this weird Japanese, over-the-top take on skateboarding but it had a really nice camera, and it was done in 3D, so we looked at that for inspiration.”
From talking to local skate shops, to watching “many 411 videos”, Porretta and the rest of Neversoft went to work on a game that focused on what made skateboarding fun in the first place. However, this was all easier said than done, as the developer was already stretched to the limit on the work they were doing for Apocalypse.
In fact, in order to bring a playable demo to Activision when asked to provide one, Neversoft had no choice but to use what they had lying around. Which in this case was the assets from Apocalypse.
“Neversoft had this Apocalypse demo,” Silvio Porretta elaborated, “Where they took out Bruce Willis, replaced him with a stock skater model, and put him on a skateboard. Mick [West] had basic physics working and it was this downhill snake run with transitions you could kind of skate.” To call it basic would be an understatement. “I don’t even know if we had a single trick at that point, you might have just been able to air out and come down.”
The demo clearly impressed Activision, and it would prove to be the deciding factor for Tony Hawk, as he had been looking to partner up with a game company for a while. While a partnership with an independent PC coder led to a rudimentary skateboarding game concept and some meetings with publishers, nothing clicked. Tony Hawk saw the rising value in his name, with companies like Rockstar reaching out with their own ideas for a skateboarding game, so he didn’t want to just partner up with anyone. The game itself had to make skateboarding accessible to the player, and above all else, it had to be a blast to play.
When Hawk met with Activision in 1998 to discuss their ideas for a game, finally, he saw people who had the same ideas he did. All it took to convince him was a digitized Bruce Willis rolling down a hill on his skateboard.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater producer Scott Pease later recalled Hawk’s first meeting with Activision. “He showed up in ripped cargo pants and a t-shirt, and Activision had this board room stuffed with dudes in suits. They sat him down and proceed to give him this 40-page Powerpoint on revenue and video games.”
It wasn’t until Hawk was presented with the rough demo Neversoft had thrown together that he began to get excited. “I could see Tony sinking in his chair,” Pease said. “After an hour of these slides, I wheeled in the demo and handed Tony the controller, and he just lit up.”
By the time the meeting was over, Tony Hawk was ready to get on board. “We knew from researching Tony that he was a gamer,” Scott Pease said, “So that was a critical component as well because he wasn’t just slapping his name on something. He was actually signing up to get involved and guide us along the way.”
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater Begins Production
“I want to say we got everybody we wanted for the first game,” producer Scott Pease said. Combining their dream list of pro skaters with suggestions from Tony Hawk, who remained a crucial part of the game’s production up to and well beyond its release, the game began to come together as Neversoft shaped the game and prepared for a late 1999 release.
Painstaking research, including Tony Hawk effectively teaching much of the Neversoft staff the ins and outs of skateboarding, helped to design the skate parks, and build an atmosphere that would appeal to hardcore skaters and casual gamers alike. This included assembling one of the most legendary soundtracks ever built for a piece of media and making that a huge part of the thrill of pulling off a wide range of seemingly impossible tricks. Neversoft had minimal resources to get the bands they wanted, so they had to be creative. Slayer, for example, generally refused to license their music for commercial ventures, but as Silvio Porretta put it “We finally got them because my ex-wife had a connection with their manager. She knew one of the guys at Suicidal Tendencies as well, so it was a no brainer to get that band in.”
Everything was effectively built from the ground up, including complex physics and tricks systems. Every step of the way, these things had to also be fun to play. Aided by Tony Hawk and some of the other skaters who got involved in the project, Neversoft quickly became immersed in all things related to the sport. “The guys would come in and visit Neversoft and hang out with us,” Scott Pease would recall fondly. “And that was like my go-to skateboarding school moment.
Production proceeded smoothly, with no one really aware of just how big the game’s release would prove to be. Then, at the last possible moment, something extraordinary occurred for both Tony Hawk and Neversoft.
Getting The 900 In Just Before Release
Two months prior to the release of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, the 1999 X-Games were held in San Francisco, California. It was here that Tony Hawk would perform the world’s first successful 900, a 2 ½ revolution aerial spin that many consider to be the defining moment in Hawk’s remarkable career. It’s a great moment, and Scott Pease knew without question that the move would need to be part of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.
“I think we were getting ready to submit the game to Sony at that point,” Pease said. “And we’re like, crap, we’ve got to get the 900 into the game. So it was just like crunch, crunch, crunch. Like grab all the video, animate, animate, animate.” The 900 would make it into the game at the zero hour, and indeed it’s one of the most satisfying tricks to pull off. “There was no choice,” Pease would say. “It had to be in there.”
With the last touches completed, and a wildly successful demo that was included on a Sony Jampack demo, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater was finally released in September of 1999, alongside heavyweights releases like Final Fantasy VIII and the Sega Dreamcast. From the moment it was released, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater stood out. By December of that year, over 350,000 units of the game were shipped to thousands of retailers. The game was almost an immediate hit, changing the lives of everyone involved forever.
It didn’t do any favors for Rockstar’s Thrasher: Skate and Destroy, who you will remember wanted to partner with the Hawkman too. Released in the long shadow already cast by Pro Skater just two months into the latter’s release, Skate and Destroy barely scratched THPS’ numbers. “It was almost like an East Coast vs. West Coast battle,” Silvio Porretta said, adding “But we won. We played that game a lot at the office but it was unplayable.”
While Thrasher justifiably still has its fans, and critical reviews were mostly positive, the game and its skewing to something more realistic just couldn’t compete with Tony Hawk on any level. There’s a reason why it never became a franchise.
25 Years Later
You probably know the rest of the story, with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater selling around 3.5 million copies and launching a long franchise of mostly good games. Nothing else has been as successful as the first few games in this series at popularizing an entire sport almost overnight, but it’s also worth celebrating just how much THPS did for alternative music and skater culture at large.
When asked which achievement has had a bigger impact on his life, being front and center of the Pro Skater series, or performing an iconic 900 at the ’99 X-Games, Tony Hawk said “THPS was the biggest aspect,” mentioning also that from a financial side of things, “It changed my life. By far it was the most lucrative thing that’s ever happened to me.”
Tony Hawk is still skateboarding, while also continuing to act as an ambassador to his sport. His Skatepark Project alone has raised over $13-million to build skate parks across the United States.
For Neversoft, the hits kept coming for a long time. The engine that brought them to Apocalypse in the first place would once again find its way into their production process for Spider-Man, released by Activision in 2000 alongside the first of many Pro Skater sequels.
In 2014, the company ended its impressive life, near-death, and rebirth when they were merged with Infinity Ward. The event was celebrated with a huge party, during which co-founder Joel Jewett launched a fiery arrow right into the center of the company’s giant eye. An appropriate gesture for a company at one time almost infamous for their “work hard, play hard” mentality and eccentricities like making a bunch of programming nerds learn how to do the Christ Air.
Referring to Neversoft’s time with the franchise, which ended in 2008 with Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground, Joel Jewett would say “It was the fastest nine-year experience you can imagine. That’s how it was because it was super non-stop and everything was pretty much frickin’ high on life the whole time. It was pretty epic.”
It’s kind of amazing to consider that all of this started with a run-and-gun starring Bruce Willis.
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