Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 is still the best sports game in 2025

Neversoft and Activision released Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 on PlayStation 2 on October 30, 2001, and more than two decades later, it still belongs in the conversation about the best games ever made, sports genre or otherwise.

The PlayStation 2 version holds a 97/100 Metascore on Metacritic, where it’s tied with Grand Theft Auto III. IGN called Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 “a masterpiece” and praised its perfectly balanced gameplay, and at the height of skateboarding culture the game felt authentic, fast, and effortlessly cool.

Its biggest addition was the revert. That one move let players link vert tricks into manuals and stretch combos far longer than before, so chasing points became less about isolated runs and more about building creative lines across an entire level, which pushed arcade sports games to a deeper level than most of the genre had reached.

Contemporaneous sales reporting says it had sold more than 2.1 million PlayStation 2 copies in the U.S. by July 2006, and it also launched on PlayStation, GameCube, Xbox, and Nintendo 64, where it ended up as the system’s final release. The soundtrack, with Motörhead, Ramones, and Del the Funky Homosapien, worked as a gateway into punk, rock, hip-hop, and skate culture.

If you want to see how the genre changed, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 is worth picking up on modern platforms, and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3’s legacy is all over the 2025 remake, in the preserved feel, the updated visuals, and the online play, even if the game’s impact outside North America and the UK, along with Neversoft’s soundtrack work, still doesn’t get much coverage.