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 First over the weekend, and hey: it’s good. It feels like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. It felt good to see these skate park stages I spent endless hours on 20-plus years ago rebuilt to modern videogame standards, and dropping back into them 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.

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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.

Hawk himself makes an appearance in the level, and it comes as a bit of a shock the first time he’s on screen. This pinball machine isn’t just idling; it’s actually being played by Hawk himself, who looms like Galactus above the entire stage. The fact that the pin is in operation adds a couple of further complications; pinballs are whizzing around the entire time, and the two flippers at the bottom of the machine will regularly thrust forward without warning. Both ball and flipper will screw you up when you least expect it; at one point I was manualing between grinds during an epic combo when a pinball pancaked me out of nowhere, and another time I was grinding on a flipper when it suddenly hurled me halfway up the playfield. And like almost all self-respecting pinball machines there’s a multiball mode that’ll really keep all skaters on their toes.

If you skip over the goal checklist at the start of the pinball level, as I did during my tightly timed demo, you’ll miss a pretty flat reveal of the enormous meta Hawk staring down at the stage. I first noticed him in the middle of a run, when I was headed up the playfield and the camera swung around at a low enough angle that I could see the very large man slamming the buttons on this pinball machine I was somehow skating through. I didn’t expect to see a skyscraper-high Tony Hawk scowling in my general direction, locked in deep concentration as he played pinball, and that only made me love this stage more than I already did.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 isn’t just a fun skate park that combines two things I love. It fully commits to the bit, looking and feeling like a real pin that’s been designed with thought and intention by real pinball designers. It could easily be Stern’s next machine after King Kong. Instead it’s just a cool, smart, new wrinkle in what seems like a fulfilling remake of the last two genuinely great Tony Hawk games.

There’s a demo for Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 up right now, but it doesn’t include the Pinball level. I’ll have to wait a month to shred through that pin again, with the full game coming out on July 11. And who knows, perhaps Skate of the Living Dead won’t remain a fictional pinball machine within a videogame forever; when I asked an Iron Galaxy dev if they’d talked to Stern or Jersey Jack or one of the other companies making new pinball machines today about doing a Tony Hawk pin, it felt like a light turned on in their head and revealed the amazing possibilities that would open up for the skating series. Perhaps this is just the start of a beautiful relationship between Tony Hawk and pinball.

Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, TV, travel, theme parks, wrestling, music, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.

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