A fan-made total conversion of Tony Hawk's Underground 2 that pulls levels from across the Neversoft era into one game, built to keep the scene online after the official servers went dark.
By around 2012 the classic Tony Hawk’s online scene was in trouble. Co-creator morten told Vice that online services for most of the games were gone, and “players were spread between different games and platforms.” The team’s answer was a single game that contained all the others. In THPSX’s words, the mod’s purpose is “to unify the community by adding levels and features from other THPS games to one central place.”
They built it on the PC version of Tony Hawk’s Underground 2. A very early version, THUG2 LEVELMOD, appeared in August 2012 with two THUG1 levels. The first THUG Pro release came on August 10, 2013, from three developers: morten, who focuses on bugs and level importing (podcast), Quazz, who focuses on scripting (podcast), and Gone. Online play has been the main mode from the start. The other long-running job, according to morten, was getting the controls to feel right, “a never ending nightmare.”
Every level in one game
Within months, Kotaku was calling it the ultimate Tony Hawk’s game: 1080p, better online play, new skater customization, and plans for “levels from every other Tony Hawk’s game (!), a level editor and even a new story mode.” Those levels kept coming. THPS3’s levels arrived in December 2015, American Wasteland’s came in batches from 2018, and version 0.7 finished THAW in October 2023.
Version 0.6 in June 2018 changed the relationship between the mod and its players by adding custom levels and soundtracks. The Blender tooling arrived at the same time. asdf’s io_thug_tools was the first public plugin. denetii’s io_thps_scene built on it, and Ksk integrated the new rendering and material effects. Together they let anyone with Blender ship a park. The 0.6 release notes read like a credits roll, with thanks to modelers, sprite and font makers, and Chase Sechrist for helping “re-ignite others interest In THPS modding.”
Today
THUG Pro is still described as “an independent, non-profit modification for Tony Hawk’s Underground 2, developed and maintained by a dedicated community” (changelog). It got a new site in 2024, and THPSX hosts the vault of user levels and skaters. THUG Pro has no Discord of its own. Its community page points to the THPSX Discord, which has almost 30,000 members, and THPSX’s podcast has interviewed many of the people on this page. To set it up next to PARTYMOD, see the THUG Pro and PARTYMOD guide.
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.
Who
What they built
Source
morten
Co-creator, and a primary developer since the start, focused on fixing bugs and importing levels from the other games.
Contributor the team thanked in the 0.6 release for helping "re-ignite others interest in THPS modding". Wikipedia's infobox lists Chase as a designer.
The release added support for custom levels and soundtracks, Create-A-Theme, over 100 playable characters, and the THAW levels Santa Monica, Marseille and Minneapolis.
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.