For anybody that hasn’t played any of the Tony Hawk’s games, or doesn’t know much about skateboarding, you may be a little confused about the title of this article, but give me a second, I can explain.
Two players managed to reach 1,000,000 points in a single grind. Something that I’d have thought would be impossible. It was possible, but it was so difficult that it required two players to use a single controller.
Here’s how it all went down.
Tony Hawk’s World Record Grind
In skateboarding, a ‘grind’, is where you take your skateboard and usually slide your trucks (the section that has the wheels on) along a rail or the edge of a flat surface.
In the Tony Hawk’s games, you would have to use the analog sticks to control a balance meter as you performed a grind. If the balance meter went too far to the left or right, you’d end up bailing.
The longer you hold the grind for, the more points you get, but as you hold it for longer, the balance meter becomes harder to control.
To make that lucrative 1,000,000 points even harder to reach, getting such a high score in one single grind would take hours if you didn’t take advantage of the trick multipliers.
In Tony Hawk’s games, you can essentially spam different buttons to change the type of grind you’re doing, mid-grind, and doing this adds an x1 multiplier to your score.
So, instead of aiming for a continuous score of 1 million, you can instead try to reach 10,000 x 100.
This is what two long time fans of the Tony Hawk’s video game franchise attempted to do. They realized very quickly, however, that this wasn’t a one man job.
Because it becomes far harder to control the grind balance meter as time progresses, you’d need to be super precise with the analog stick, and that’d require two hands.
As a result, one person controlled the analog stick to control the balance meter, whilst the other person spammed alternating buttons to increase the score multiplier.
It took multiple attempts, but eventually, both players managed to reach the 1,000,000 score. You can check out their attempts and their overall success below. The game they got the score on was Tony Hawk’s Underground.
After seeing this challenge, I wanted to see what other crazy scores and accomplishments people have achieved in Tony Hawk’s games in the past.
Here is a look at some of the most impressive Tony Hawks’ video game world records I’ve found on the internet.
Highest Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 Score On Hangar
Guinness World Records has an official record set for the highest score on perhaps the most popular game in the Tony Hawk’s series and the most renowned level.
According to the Guinness World Records website, Matt Tholen from the United States managed to score 30,887,653 on Hangar on the PlayStation version of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2.
From what I understand, this score was within the time limit given, and not within just one combo. This record was set in March, 2001, so it’s possible somebody may have beaten it since and has simply not tried to take the title.
If you think you could beat this score, you should hit up Guinness World Records.
Fastest Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater Speed Run
A huge community has been built around the concept of speedrunning. The idea is that you try to beat games as quickly as possible.
People compete against each other to get the best speeds and some people end up playing the game thousands of times over to perfect their run.
In this instance, a player named George from the United States managed to complete the career mode of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater in just 4 minutes and 39 seconds.
Each level has the typical 2 minute time limit and there are a total of 9 levels. George managed to overcome this by completing enough challenges to move onto the next level, immediately pausing, ending the run, then going back to the level select to move onto the next level.
If you used to play Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, you’ll probably find the video above as fascinating as I did.
This record was set 2 years ago, and the closest score since then was set by a player named guished, also in the US, with a time of 4 minutes, 48 seconds.
It could be possible that George’s score could be beaten, but so far he has remained undefeated. Anybody up for the challenge?
1 Billion Points in Tony Hawk’s Underground 1
The THUG games made it a little easier to get points than the old Pro Skater games. In THUG 1 & 2, you were able to get off the board. Players found out that there were methods you could use to get off of the board to reset the balance meters.
When off the board, you’d have a short period where you’re able to get back on your board and continue your combo.
Even still, this 1 billion points combo in Tony Hawk’s Underground 1 is very impressive. I’m not sure what would have been more challenging, the 1 million points single grind, or the 1 billion points combo.
I feel like the latter may have been more challenging. Even with the help of the no-board trick, the player responsible for making this record still had to do it all one his own and it took over nine minutes of continuous playing to reach the score.
Unfortunately, I can’t find any officially set records for many Tony Hawk’s games, so it’s hard to see what the actual highest score is, but this 1 billion points is pretty impressive. I’d love to know what the highest ever single combo score reached has been.
Summary
What are your thoughts on these crazy Tony Hawk’s records? Do you think you’d be able to beat any of these top scores or speedruns? If not, what game do you think you have the best chance of making a world record in?