Tony Hawk pulls off new trick: getting Bam back in Pro Skater 3 and 4

The upcoming remaster of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 and 4 will welcome skater Bam Margera back into the fold, Activision announced Thursday. Margera appeared as a skater in the original versions of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 and 4, but was not previously confirmed to appear in the remasters. The skater and longtime pal of Tony Hawk will be included as a secret skater, meaning he’ll eventually be unlockable.

Margera appeared in numerous Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games, starting with THPS 3 and ending with Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground, so his exclusion from the upcoming remasters was considered unusual. Reportedly, Hawk pushed Activision and developer Iron Galaxy to add Margera after “the game was already done.”

“Tony called up Activision and was like, ‘Hey, we’re putting Bam in the thing,’ and they were like, ‘Hey, we can’t,’” said Roger Bagley, co-host of skateboarding podcast The Nine Club, in a livestream back in March. “He goes, ‘No, you’re gonna do it,’ and basically made them fly Bam back out there to get body scanned and everything else, and get him back in the game.”

In a behind-the-scenes video about the making of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 and 4 — which shows Margera being body scanned — the returning skater says that he was obsessed with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 and jokingly reminisced about missing flights because he played it so much.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 and 4 will be released on July 11, for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X. The remasters of THPS 3 and 4 will offer online multiplayer and a massive visual upgrade over the originals. In addition to olds like Tony and Bam, new skaters including Rayssa Leal, Chloe Covell, Jamie Foy, Zion Wright, Nyjah Huston, and Yuto Horigome will be playable. Classic levels like Airport, Foundry, Rio, Tokyo, Canada, San Francisco, and Los Angeles will be here — but the more open-ended, free-skating space of THPS 4 will be reimagined as classic, self-contained Pro Skater-style levels.