Jess Margera is the drummer for the band CKY, and he’s also skateboarder Bam Margera’s older brother. He’s also the source behind what may be a leak for a future Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater game.
Margera was on the Behind Closed Doors podcast in April. In a part of the conversation about making money as a musician, Margera mentioned licensing music to things like video games as a source of income. “Now touring is your main income, and you really have to try and get licensing deals, try and get in where you can on video games or whatever, because that’s another way to make some money,” Margera said.
“I’m assuming you guys are on at least one of the Tony Hawk games, weren’t you?” Lopez, the interviewer asks.
“Yeah, and I believe we’re doing the new one coming out too,” Margera replies. CKY’s song “96 Quite Bitter Beings” appeared on the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 soundtrack back in 2001. You can catch the conversation at around 39:00 in the video below.
It would be easy to write off the comment as referring to last year’s release of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 and 2—after all, not everyone keeps up closely with the games space—though Margera goes on to specifically reference the remake of the first two games. “I bet that was huge news when you found that out,” Lopez says. Margera replies “Yeah, my son just got a PS5 and he got the remaster of 1 and 2…” So Margera is clearly aware of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 and 2 as a separate game from whatever “new one coming out” he’s referencing. It’s also important to note that CKY is not featured in 1 and 2 at all.
Last year, the band The Death Set leaked the existence of an upcoming Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater game on Facebook, saying that they had licensed five songs to “Tony Hawk 2020.” Curiously, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 and 2 did not feature The Death Set at all despite adding 37 new songs in addition to the original soundtrack, so it’s unclear if their songs were removed as punishment for leaking the game, or if their music will be a part of a different game coming up later.
Margera’s comments about the “new one coming out” could refer to Activision remaking Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 and 4 in the same way they did the first two. This would include relicensing a majority of the original music (similar to what they did with 1 and 2), which would bring CKY’s “96 Quite Bitter Beings” from THPS3 into this hypothetical remake. Or might Activision be hard at work correcting the mistake of the last original Tony Hawk game—the ill-received Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5—and making a new one that better reflects the classic games? After all, Crash Bandicoot 4 was an original new Crash title that followed the success of the N. Sane Trilogy.
However, one more wrench in the works is Activision’s shuffling of studios to work on other flagship franchises. The publisher merged Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 and 2 developer Vicarious Visions into Blizzard to work solely on Blizzard games moving forward—currently Diablo 2 Resurrected. Many other studios under the company umbrella are working on Call of Duty. If Activision does have another studio working on Tony Hawk’s games right now, it’s not clear exactly where these hypothetical games might be in development.
[Via: VGC]