The Tony Hawk Pro Skater Documentary Just Hit A Major Snag

Tony Hawk Pro Skater Documentary
(Image credit: Activision)

Producer Ralph D'Amato worked on the original Tony Hawk Pro Skater games and has come back to work on a documentary centered around the development of the game series, following the ups and downs of one of the biggest video game properties from 20 years ago. Well, the documentary just hit a major snag.

According to Gamespot, the documentary centered around the Tony Hawk Pro Skater games ended up getting stopped at a pretty major obstacle: they failed to hit their crowd-funding goal on IndieGoGo.

D'Amato and the rest of the crew wanting to work on the documentary had taken their idea to IndieGoGo in hopes of getting crowdfunding to finish the project. They were seeking $75,000 from the community platform, but they came up quite short when the project only managed to accrue $17.409.

But there is a silver lining. When campaigns don't meet their goal on IndieGoGo they still get to keep what they've earned when the campaign ends. So D'Amato will be using the $17,409 toward the production of the documentary.

They're also planning on self-financing aspects of it and seeking funding for the documentary, which is called Pretending I'm A Superman: The Tony Hawk Video Game Story. The title is based on one of the more popular songs from the original Tony Hawk Pro Skater from way back in the PSX days.

According to the letter sent out from Ralph D'Amato and Ludvig Gur, they mention that they never intentioned to rely solely on crowdfunding, where they mention in a Twitter post...

Our plan was never to entirely rely on an Indiegogo campaign. If we would have received the full sum, the process of making the documentary may have gone faster but we are in it for the long or short haul, regardless. Multiple sponsors have shown great interest and because of that we'll be able to continue.

So it sounds as if they'll get the full funding needed to finish the documentary but they won't be able to rely on a hefty bit of helping from the total $75,000 that they had wanted.

The documentary was designed to cover the development and culture surrounding the popularity (and its decline) between the original Pro Skater leading all the way up to the latest 2015 outing, which was a critical and commercial failure for a multitude of reasons.

A lot of gamers are rather ambivalent to the documentary, and would rather Tony Hawk take the brand to another publisher and get a proper game made with a development team who really cares about making great extreme sports games. The latest outing, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5, was a mobile-port with a lot of low-quality recycled assets and poor playability, along with floaty physics and reused canned animations from years ago. It goes without saying that a lot of gamers were not pleased with the results.

The Tony Hawk Pro Skater brand worth has slowly diminished over time, and it seems like a documentary of this sort would have been at its most valuable during the release of Tony Hawk's American Wasteland. Nevertheless, we'll see what becomes of the documentary now that the IndieGoGo campaign has wrapped.

Will Usher

Staff Writer at CinemaBlend.