How the original Tony Hawk's PC ports got modern controllers, widescreen, fixes for modern Windows and online play again, years after GameSpy shut down.
The Tony Hawk’s PC ports ran their online play through GameSpy. When it shut down for non-EA games on May 31, 2014, they went offline overnight. The Tony Hawk’s community was ready. OpenSpy, created by CHC, already hosted the games’ message of the day, and by 2013 THPSX’s Krad and Freddy had taken it over as a non-commercial service funded by donations. Running it cost about $240 a year at the time (2014 snapshot). PCGamingWiki now describes OpenSpy as “an open-source clone of GameSpy servers”. Its current server, openspy-core, is a full rewrite that went public in 2018 and has grown to cover games far beyond Tony Hawk’s. Fan patches can point the old games at OpenSpy instead of GameSpy.
ClownJob’d
%.Gone, one of the THUG Pro developers, released ClownJob’d for THUG1 in 2020 and for THUG2 in 2021. The goal was “to add some bug fixes and features asked about in the community, all while being self-contained and not making changes to any loose files”. That meant OpenSpy support plus, according to PCGamingWiki, modern Windows support, more resolutions and borderless windowed mode.
PARTYMOD
PARTYMANX released PARTYMOD for THPS3 on the game’s 21st birthday in October 2022. Over the next two years it spread to every Neversoft PC port: THPS4, American Wasteland, THPS2, Mat Hoffman’s Pro BMX, and both Underground games on the same day in December 2024. The project site calls it “a series of patches, mostly for the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series, that fixes bugs as well as introduces modernizations such as modern controller support via SDL2”. The THUG patches credit ClownJob’d for much of their inspiration.
The patches are deliberately conservative. They’re “designed to keep the game as original as possible, and leave its files unmodified” (README). A small partypatcher.exe writes a patched copy of the executable and leaves the original alone. Along the way PARTYMANX wrote a Vulkan renderer for THPS2. On October 1, 2026, they released THPS3 2.0, rewritten in Rust on SDL3.
The scene exists because these people gave their time, usually for free. If you're missing from this list, or we got your work wrong, fix it on GitHub.
Writes every PARTYMOD patch, for THPS2, THPS3, THPS4, THUG, THUG2, American Wasteland and Mat Hoffman's Pro BMX, including a Vulkan renderer for THPS2.
The original creator of OpenSpy and its backend developer. By far the largest committer to openspy-core, the open-source GameSpy replacement the patches connect to.
After an earlier operator shut it down, OpenSpy comes back as a non-commercial, donation-funded service owned by Krad and Freddy of THPSX, with CHC on the backend.
Missing something? This history is open source. Add an event, a person or a correction, with a source, in the source file. Early work is always the least documented, so dates, names and archived links are especially welcome.