$1 million in debt, devs on handheld Tony Hawk's Pro Skater saved the company by pitching "fake" screenshots that forced them to turn the GBA into a 3D gaming machine: "Nobody could believe it"

Back in the '90s and '00s, seeing a home console game ported to a handheld platform usually resulted in something absolutely dreadful, but somehow, the Game Boy Advance versions of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater turned out to be essential parts of that platform's library. These ports exist, in part, simply because developer Vicarious Visions was deep in debt and desperately needed something to keep the company afloat.

Karthik Bala founded Vicarious Visions alongside his brother in 1991, and the pair spent years working on various passion projects before starting to take on various bits of contract work. Those projects included things like a Game Boy Color port of Activision's Spider-Man game. But by 2000, things at the 45-person studio had started to look dire – a major contract had fallen through, and the company suddenly couldn't make payroll.

"We were literally hand-to-mouth, and what happened was we had to go get a loan from the bank," Bala told Time Extension. "My brother and I went bank to bank to bank, and nobody would give us a loan because at the time we were just a few years out of college, we had a big payroll, we didn't have any collateral, and we didn't have any assets; I was barely making my rent at the time."

Eventually, Bala and his brother convinced a bank to give them a $1 million dollar loan, but "we knew that if we didn't pull this off, we would pretty much be in debt for the rest of our lives." They were able to pay their employees, but they needed more work to ensure the company's future. Luckily, Activision liked their work on Spider-Man and they'd managed to get ahold of early Game Boy Advance hardware, two factors that opened a big opportunity for the studio.

"My brother and I went to E3 2000, and Tony Hawk had just been a big hit for Activision on PlayStation," Bala explained. "We wanted to bring Tony Hawk to handheld, and my brother saw Tony Hawk at the Activision booth. Because of that, we said, 'Hey, we should go pitch Tony Hawk on a game for the Game Boy Advance.'"

Inspired by an isometric arcade skateboarding game from the '80s called 720, Bala called up the team back home and said, "'Why don't we put a pitch together and fake up some screenshots of what it could look like on the GBA?' The artists did that quickly, and FedEx'd me the colour printouts, and we went back to the Activision booth to go find Tony. It was all kind of ridiculous."

Both Tony Hawk and Activision evidently liked what they saw, because Vicarious Visions got the green light to make their GBA port. There was just one problem: it was impossible.

"Coming back from E3, we then told the team we were going to do this project," Bala said, "and they're like, 'Yeah, we've got some bad news for you. To render out all the sprites and all the animation that's needed for all the tricks and movement in 2D, it won't fit on the Game Boy Advance cartridge because there's only 8 megabytes of storage. Just the animations alone would be 80 megabytes.' But we had this handshake deal, so we had to figure it out."

So a 2D, sprite-based take on Tony Hawk was out the window. The solution? Just make the GBA render 3D, polygonal skaters. That's a tall feat on a platform built for SNES-level graphics, but Bala credits developers Matt Conte and Alex Rybakov with making it work. "It was a super complicated and laborious process," Bala explained. "But it ran at 60 frames per second. When Nintendo saw it and when Activision saw it, nobody could believe it, because it was like this 3D game on a handheld, and it felt and played like Tony Hawk."

Vicarious Visions' take on Tony Hawk's Pro Skater launched alongside the new handheld in 2001, and is still considered one of the best GBA games of all time. "That was our big breakout hit," Bala added. "It was year that we paid back all of our debt, and we became a premier developer on the Game Boy Advance. After that, we went on to do a lot of really fun licenses and IPs. At that point, it was like, 'You know what? This is what we should embrace. We should embrace doing console and handheld games with big IP.'"

The partnership between Vicarious Visions and Activision was strong enough that the publisher eventually acquired the studio in 2005. The studio would continue to support various Activision titles over the years, including numerous handheld editions of games like Guitar Hero and Skylanders. But after delivering the fantastic Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2 remakes in 2020, Vicarious Visions was shuffled over to become part of Blizzard and now largely offers support on the Diablo franchise.

Tony Hawk also starred in some of the best PS1 games ever made.