Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4

The clock was the series' defining constraint for three games. Two minutes, a level, a checklist. Neversoft threw it out here and replaced it with a free skate that never ends, where every goal has to be requested from someone standing around the park. Roll up to a character, hit the button, and the timer starts only for that task. It sounds like a small administrative change. It reorganised everything about how the levels read.

Because you could now linger, the maps got bigger and less obviously segmented. College sprawls into a quad and a set of stair sets you actually have to learn; San Francisco leans on hills and skitching behind traffic; Alcatraz turns a prison into a run of ramps and rails without ever quite losing the shape of the building. The Kona skatepark, an actual Florida institution, is the closest the series had come to a level built by skaters rather than for combos. Objectives are no longer a uniform set of five per stage but a scattered pile, with pro challenges from the real roster tucked behind the ordinary ones.

It is also the hardest game in the run, and not always in a way that flatters it. The later goals demand specific trick strings executed on specific geometry with cash-only margins for error, and the difficulty curve spikes rather than climbs. Some of the tasks are genuinely inventive. Some are busywork dressed up as a challenge, and the free-form structure means you can wander a level for a while unsure which of the twenty available jobs is actually achievable at your current stat level.

What holds up is the skating itself. The 4 engine is the most refined version of the pre-Underground model: manuals, reverts and spine transfers all bolted on, so a line can theoretically run forever if your thumbs hold. Balance meters are forgiving enough to be fun and tight enough to punish greed. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 sits at the exact point where the series was still about the score line and not yet about a story, and that makes it the last one that plays like an arcade machine.

Play it now and the free-roaming structure feels like a first draft of what Underground would formalise a year later, right down to the wandering NPCs. But the physics are cleaner here, unencumbered by getting off the board, and the levels are built for one purpose only. You can still lose an hour to College trying to link a single run from the roof to the fountain.