Activision: 'We Let the Consumer Down on Tony Hawk'

As part of a wide-ranging interview to be published on IndustryGamers in the near future, Activision Publishing CEO Mike Griffith has told us during E3 that he felt his company didn't meet consumers' expectations in recent years on the Tony Hawk series. The franchise was a staple for Activision for many, many years, but somewhere along the way, the series stopped innovating and also had to deal with fierce competition from rival EA's new Skate IP.

"I don't believe in franchise fatigue because that implies there's just something inherent about a franchise that becomes fatiguing. What I do agree with is that we let the consumer down on Tony Hawk with inadequate innovation. We had a great run on Tony, nine years and more than a billion dollars in sales, countless millions of satisfied consumers but we lacked breakthrough innovation in the later years and the game got harder and harder and harder to play, in order to satisfy the hardcore audience. In doing that we inadvertently left the mass audience behind, and so we knew we had to step back and reinvent the franchise." 

That's precisely what Activision is now doing with the help of recently formed Chicago-based Robomodo, which built Tony Hawk: Ride to take advantage of a special skateboard deck peripheral that comes bundled with the game. Griffith couldn't be happier with the new approach that Robomodo has taken with the franchise.

"We took a year off and looked at a lot of different ways we could accomplish this and in the end determined that this cycle's willingness to engage in physical interface gave us a great opportunity to reinvent the franchise. By adding a board controller with very sophisticated electronics – precise movement detection, infrared sensors to see if your hand is grabbing the board – we can recreate the skateboarding experience in the living room. We took a page out of the Guitar Hero handbook with this; Guitar Hero lets you feel like a rock star even though you can't play a single note and Tony Hawk Ride lets you feel like you're doing all these fantastic tricks like Tony can do when in real life you can't. ... Robomodo has done a great job in bringing this feeling of living Tony Hawk's experiences vicariously That's really the new innovation we brought to Tony, with the intention of re-engaging this to be a mass market brand, and I think they've succeeded."

Tony Hawk: Ride ships later this fall. While Robomodo is handling the PS3/360 version, Buzz Monkey is developing the Wii version. You'd think that taking advantage of the Wii Balance Board peripheral (which already has an installed base of over 15 million) would be an obvious move for this new title, but Griffith said it just didn't feel right. Of course,similar to Guitar Hero, bundling in another sizable peripheral also enables Activision to charge more for the product.

"[Using the Balance Board] wouldn't have been nearly as exciting an experience. We looked at it and the Wii Fit board is designed to play the Wii Fit game very well... but our board has so much precision and measurement, the ability to detect hand movements and rock up or down, and so when we looked at the Balance Board [for Tony Hawk] we felt it was an artificial experience. It wouldn't have been as successful, and this makes it an authentic skateboarding experience."