Tony Hawk went back to the real Los Angeles plaza that inspired a level in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3, rolled around its red orbs and crescent benches for a 25th anniversary clip, and got shooed out by a security guard before he could finish.
“Happy 25th THPS3!” the skateboarder wrote on his own social media account, adding: “We got kicked out of Pershing Square while shooting this today.” He kept the tone light. “She [security] just shoo’d us away,” he wrote. “It was very anticlimactic.”
The video shows Hawk skating through Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles, the public park designed by architect Ricardo Legorreta, and stopping by the nearby car wash with its tall blue obelisk, another landmark that players of the 2001 game will recognize at once. The soundtrack is “Blitzkrieg Bop” by the Ramones, and most of the actual tricks are left to his pixelated PlayStation 2 self.
Why Pershing Square matters to players
The Los Angeles stage in Pro Skater 3 never names the park, but its layout copies the square’s stone benches, its oversized spheres and the surrounding office towers. The real place has barely changed in a quarter of a century, which is exactly why a side-by-side recreation looked like easy content.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 reached North American shelves on October 30, 2001. Developed by Neversoft and published by Activision, it was the first game in the series on the PlayStation 2 and the first PS2 title with online play. It still sits at the top of Metacritic’s PlayStation 2 rankings with an average score of 97, level with Grand Theft Auto III.
The Pro Skater story so far
Badiyaa traced the whole series, because the ejection lands at a strange point in its history. The arc runs from a 12-person studio to a multi-million-selling franchise, a collapse, and a comeback built on remakes.
- 1999: Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater arrives on the original PlayStation on September 29. Hawk lands the first 900 at the X Games a month before launch, and sales take off.
- 2000 to 2002: Pro Skater 2, 3 and 4 follow yearly. The second and third games still rank among the highest rated titles ever for their consoles.
- 2003 to 2007: Neversoft shifts to story modes with Underground, Underground 2, American Wasteland, Project 8 and Proving Ground. Rival series Skate outsells the last of those two to one.
- 2009 to 2015: Robomodo takes over. The skateboard-peripheral games Ride and Shred flop, Pro Skater HD gets mixed reviews, and the rushed Pro Skater 5 is panned. Hawk’s licensing deal with Activision expires in December 2015.
- 2020: Vicarious Visions remakes the first two games as Pro Skater 1 + 2, released September 4.
- 2025: Iron Galaxy’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 launches on July 11 for PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, Switch 2 and PC, with 30 playable pros.
Hawk has said that remakes of the third and fourth games were planned straight after 1 + 2, then cancelled when Vicarious Visions was folded into Blizzard. The 2025 bundle revived that idea, and its Metacritic scores land between 81 and 86 across platforms, a notch below the 88 to 90 of its predecessor.
A quarter century, one guard
So the skater whose name sells the games could not finish a short clip in a public park that his franchise helped make famous. There is no suggestion that anyone did anything wrong; a security worker asked a film crew to move on, and they did.
The remake of the Pershing Square level is still a click away for anyone with Pro Skater 3 + 4, which Activision released on July 11, 2025. The original game turned 25 on October 30, 2026.
Further reading
Image: Victor Solanoy, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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