Tony Hawk reveals life-changing money he made from Pro Skater games after rejecting one-time $500,000 fee
Joe Harker
Featured Image Credit: YouTube/The Nine Club/Activision
If you were gaming around the turn of the millennium then there's a pretty good chance you played at least some of the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater games.
If you didn't play them then you should know they were a damn good time - people happily spent hours trying to pull off all sorts of tricks, collecting all the 'S-K-A-T-E' letters and finding the secret tapes.
The first Pro Skater games came out back in the days when internet guides were just starting to take off so you could either try and find the hidden areas yourself or look up the answers online and hope they were legit.
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If memory serves correctly you could also unlock a few other characters not normally associated with skateboarding like Darth Maul and Shrek.
They probably also resulted in plenty of bruises, grazed knees and potentially a broken bone or two from kids who played the games and decided they'd give skateboarding a go for themselves.
Anyhow, the Pro Skater games were undeniably cool (and have gained a new lease of life thanks to the remaster a few years ago) and catapulted titular skateboarding star Hawk to incredible fame.
Speaking on YouTube channel The Nine Club, the skateboarder revealed just how much he was making from the Pro Skater games at the apex of their popularity.
"When the fourth game was released my main contact at Activision asked to have lunch with me in LA when I was there one day," the skateboarding star recounted.
"He's not the head but he was definitely the guy overseeing our games. He's like 'here's what's happening, we're releasing the fourth game, the last three are still in the top 10 of sales'.
"One is going into, I forgot what they call it, classic mode which they sell at a certain price but way more volume. He's like 'so things are way bigger than you ever thought' and he handed me a check for four million dollars."
Hawk remembered that the whopping $4 million amount was something akin to an 'annual royalty' (meaning there was plenty more where that came from over the years) from the sales of the Pro Skater games and he hadn't been expecting so much.
Running (or perhaps rolling) through his head at that moment had been the thought 'cool, I might get a million dollars' and it turned out to be four times as much as his wildest dreams.
After receiving such a huge amount of money, the skater remembers offering to put some of that $4 million towards paying for lunch.
He credits the game with having 'changed my life', but things could have been very different had Hawk made a different decision back when he was first approached to put his name and likeness in the game.
He was initially offered a one-off fee of $500,000 to use his image and name for the game and decided to turn that down.
The skater also told the Diary of a CEO podcast that Activision picked up on a 'buzz' around the first game before launch and offered him a buyout of his royalty rights just before it launched.
Activision won't be feeling too out of pocket however, as Tony Hawk's Pro Skater games have brought in about $1.4 billion in sales since the first game launched in 1999.
His decision to avoid the one-off payment and keep letting the royalties roll in in proved to be a pretty smart decision.