Tony Hawk's Underground | Nintendo GameCube

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About the Game

Tony Hawk's Underground puts a skater you create at the center of its story. You begin in New Jersey with a worn board and a friend, Eric, then work toward sponsorship and a professional career. A visit from Chad Muska gives that journey its first direction, but your progress depends on completing challenges in the neighborhoods and cities you reach. The story moves between street skating, competitions and encounters with professional skaters, using in-game scenes to connect the stages of your rise.

The objectives give each location a reason to explore. Some ask for a trick at a particular spot, a target score or a collection of items; others lead into judged skating competitions or a vehicle mission. You can change your created skater's look as the career develops, so the character stays customizable rather than becoming a fixed professional from the roster. Difficulty settings change the demands of the goals, including their score and time limits, letting you choose how much pressure to put on a run.

Skating still centers on connecting moves into a single scoring sequence. Manuals link action on flat ground, reverts help continue a run after landing from a ramp, and spine transfers carry you between facing transitions. Underground adds the ability to get off the board: you can run, climb and reposition, including using ladders and reaching rooftops. During a combo, that movement is governed by a draining run meter. Returning to the board before it empties lets the sequence continue, while wall plants and wall pushes offer further ways to use the surrounding scenery.

Improvement is tied to what your skater actually does. Separate stat challenges ask for feats such as maintaining a grind or covering a jump distance, and successful attempts improve the corresponding ability. Amateur and professional stages expand how far those abilities can grow. Challenges from the professional skaters can also provide additional special-trick slots. This gives practice a second purpose: a longer grind can both help a goal and contribute to the skater's development, rather than every upgrade arriving simply because a story objective was completed.

The creation tools extend beyond your character. Create-a-Park lets you arrange a skating space, and Create-a-Goal gives you tasks to place within it. Create-a-Trick combines and adjusts existing trick movements, while deck creation lets you layer graphics onto a board. These tools give you ways to design a line or objective after learning what makes the regular levels work. The main locations bring ramps, bowls and other skate spots into larger urban areas, with rails and climbable routes connecting opportunities that may not all be visible from the starting point.

The career's destinations and street activity support its road-to-the-pros theme, with voiced scenes, traffic and pedestrians framing the skating. Rock, alternative and hip-hop tracks accompany the runs, and the playlist can be adjusted if you prefer certain tracks. On GameCube, two players can compete simultaneously in local split-screen play, using separate controllers on the same console. The package also identifies Memory Card saving for your progress. The combination of a personal career, physical stat challenges, on-foot combo movement and editors gives this entry a different rhythm from simply choosing an established pro and clearing a checklist.