IndustryGamers: How did you come to work on the new Tony Hawk? Did Activision contact you or you pitched them?
Josh sees the Tony Hawk board as a platform unto itself, not just a peripheral
Joshua Tsui: We knew a few key people at Activision, so we've always had conversations way before the Tony Hawk project came up. When we were able to get a team together from former EA Chicago and other past studios, Activision at the time was looking to reinvigorate the franchise, so in many ways the planets just aligned properly. Although we had never done a skateboarding game before, they knew we could reinvigorate things really well just based on our previous work. They had the foresight to understand that it's not about what genres we worked on before. It's about what makes a game fun and how to innovate on that.
IG: The idea of the board itself for the game, was that Robomodo's idea?
JT: That actually came from Tony Hawk himself. Tony is a big tech geek; he skateboards but he actually knows how to program and he hacks things all the time. He's been wanting to do this type of controller for quite some time and he felt that after the success of games like Guitar Hero and peripherals now being more accepted [the time was right], so he went to Activision and said it's time to start changing things up. Activision and Tony Hawk came to Robomodo to talk to us about this, and their big directions were, “We want you guys to work from a clean slate to do something new with Tony Hawk. And on top of that, it has to be on a board controller.” But besides that, there were very little other details. So we just took that direction and ran with it, started prototyping all kinds of boards and everything.
IG: And the design of the board and its internal electronics – who's behind that?
JT: There were a number of people at Robomodo. I was more the high level guy than anything else. There were certain things I knew I wanted or didn't want on the board. One was everything had to be on the board. There have been after market peripherals where you stand on a board but you still have to hold something in your hand. We wanted it to be hands free – it has to be like real skateboarding. ... So it was an evolutionary process across quite a few different people, but we had one main guy – David Tibbetts – and we were really lucky he joined Robomodo when he did. He just loves hacking things apart and making gadgets, and having him on the team was amazing because he was able to do all the prototyping. Our first board was literally a blank skate deck with a Wii remote on top of it Bluetoothing to a PC version of a Tony Hawk game; that's how we first got started and then we began adding more and more to it.
IG: Mike Griffith told us that one of the problems with recent Tony Hawk games was that they got too hard, and that basically left out the mass market audience. Did Activision give you directions to make the game much more accessible and user-friendly so it can be more mainstream?
JT: That's actually something we all had independently agreed upon. Obviously, we all came together and said these are our goals for the game, but a lot of our guys on the team are not skateboarders. We understood that we wanted to be authentic to skate culture but we wanted to make a game that would appeal to a broad audience and so we had to change things up quite a bit. In many ways, the board control opens it up to a lot of people. One of the pillars [of our design] was make it easy for people to get on the board and to play immediately. We made it so that if you've ever seen somebody skateboard you can quickly figure out what to do.
IG: Did you feel an immense pressure from Activision? Obviously this has been a big staple franchise for them for many, many years and overhauling it is a huge responsibility. How did you react to that pressure?
JT: The ironic thing is that early on we didn't feel as pressured because we were kind of in experimental phase, and in some ways Activision was stepping back a little bit to see what we can do. As things started working and the game was feeling better and better, people were starting to see the potential of what we could do and that's when more pressure started coming in, just for ourselves; we started realizing we have something here, and Activision knows we have something here, and now we all want to start making it bigger and better as we go along. We started pressuring ourselves more and more to step it up as we realized we could pull off so many great things.
