Last month legendary pro skateboarder Tony Hawk teased in a comment on Instagram that he had a new mobile game in the works and that it would be “coming soon-ish." Well, now we know what game he was referring to as a new game called Tony Hawk’s Skate Jam has popped up in the App Store for pre-order with an expected release date of December 13th. What’s the game all about? Well we only have screens and a description to go by, and those state to expect a “Classic Career Mode" as well as “Global Skate Jam tournaments" and that the game will “set a new bar for authentic tricks, controls and music in a mobile skate game, thanks to Tony." That all sounds rather promising, if it actually delivers!
You may remember that the Tony Hawk franchise has an interesting history on the App Store. Way back in the early days, some enterprising hobbyist developers ported Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 in full to the iPhone just to showcase that it was possible, and once Tony got wind of it he worked with Activision to commission an official release. That version was a bit clunky with virtual controls but still fun as it was all those years ago. More recently Tony set out to create a truly native mobile game which was called Tony Hawk’s Shred Session, which was kind of a behind the back runner take on the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games. It too was pretty fun but after an extremely long soft launch period the game was unceremoniously put on indefinite hold, never to be heard from again. RIP.
I’m really hoping that based on the vague info in the App Store description that Tony Hawk’s Skate Jam is a more authentic skateboarding game with really smart touch controls, and in my dreams it would be similar to the open-world Skate games on console. The 3rd person runner combined with skating thing certainly made sense, but there’s nothing quite like a skating game where you can actually cruise around and skate as you want to. The great news is that we won’t have to wait long to find out what Tony Hawk’s Skate Jam is like as it should be arriving next week, stay tuned!
