The game resulted in a successful franchise, receiving eight annualized sequels developed by Neversoft from Pro Skater 2 (2000) to Proving Ground (2007).

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater puts the player in control of a skateboarder and takes place in a third-person view with a fixed camera.

Movement can be altered using the d-pad or analog stick, and ollies, grabs, flips and grinds are each assigned to individual buttons.

Three of the mode's levels take place in a competition setting in which the player performs for judges and accumulates the highest score within three one-minute rounds.

Other single-player modes include the "Single Session", in which the player can freely accumulate a high score within two minutes using any previously obtained levels and characters, and the "Free Skate", in which there is no time limit imposed.

[13][14][15][16] The multiplayer mode is played by two players in a split screen view and offers three games: "Graffiti", "Trick Attack", and "HORSE".

[13][14][16] The game features a total of ten real life professional skateboarders, along with two unlockable original characters: Officer Dick and Private Carrera.

[19] During development, the Neversoft team would spend its lunch breaks at a bowling alley near the studio, where they would play and subsequently study from Sega's Top Skater in the arcade.

Although the team decided early on that Top Skater's linearity lacked the sense of fun they aimed for, the "racetrack" element was retained in two of the game's final levels.

Contrary to subsequent titles in the series, Neversoft did not primarily focus on using pre-existing locations as reference for the game's level design, but simply envisioned potential skating areas such as a school or a city and incorporated elements such as ramps and rails to benefit the gameplay.

[20][21][22] Once the prototype reached a functional and demonstrable state, the Neversoft team realized that they would require a professional skateboarder to aid in the remainder of production.

Hawk was quickly impressed by the design team members' devotion to skateboarding, the controls and engine of their game's early build and agreed to lend his name and involvement to the production.

As a result of the series' eventual success, Hawk would earn ten times Activision's initial offer within two years.

Activision senior vice president Mitch Lasky, in an interview with GameSpot, stated that the character was meant "to reflect Tony's signature style – an intense mix of acrobatics and hard-core technical skating".

[31][32][33] The Nintendo 64 and Game Boy Color versions received a multi-million dollar advertising campaign on several major youth-targeted channels in the United States beginning in April 2000.

[34][35] As a result of the disappointing sales of Blue Stinger, Activision was discouraged from publishing further titles for the Dreamcast and relinquished the distribution of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater on the console to Crave Entertainment.

[31] While the port is largely faithful to the original version and retains all game modes, characters and levels, the soundtrack had been truncated and the voices were removed to accommodate the lessened space in the cartridge format.

"Tournament Mode" is a five-level vertically scrolling game in which the player must race against three computer-controlled skaters and achieve the highest rank.

Doug Perry of IGN praised the game's "imaginative, deep, and amazingly addictive" gameplay, "steady and consistent" learning curve, "intuitive and natural" controls, large and complex levels, "jaw-dropping" physics and "perfect" soundtrack.

[14] He additionally noted that the Dreamcast version used the console's hardware to its advantage by displaying clearer textures and a smoother frame rate "that may very well cause longtime fans of the game to weep".

[71] Matt Casamassina of IGN praised the Nintendo 64 version's visuals as "very impressive" in spite of the reduced quality of the textures and the omitted full-motion video effects, and the audio as "surprisingly clear", albeit compressed and "dumbed down" to accommodate the cartridge format.

[48] Frank Provo of GameSpot cited the game's lack of level variety and "borderline mediocre" audio, but felt that it was the best skateboarding title to be made for a portable console.

[49][70] Three reviewers for Next Generation magazine - Blake Fischer, Eric Bratcher, and Greg Orlando - gave five stars out of five for PlayStation, Nintendo 64, and Dreamcast versions, respectively.

[81] The Verband der Unterhaltungssoftware Deutschland gave the PlayStation version a Gold Award for 100,000 sold copies in Germany by February 2000.

[7][86][87] In a 2023 essay for The New York Times Magazine, Irish writer Jack Sheehan reflected on the game's impact, writing: "Released at a moment when skateboarding was beginning to go mainstream, T.H.P.S.

became popular because it invited skaters and nonskaters alike to feel the thrill of getting air, doing a kick flip or landing a trick by the thinnest margin.