Tony Hawk skate park editor sounds cool but it’s full of metaverse and NFT nonsense-Michael Beckwith-Entertainment – Metro

EA’s new Skate game can not come any sooner (pic: The Sandbox)

Anyone wishing for a new Tony Hawk game probably won’t be pleased with the Birdman’s new metaverse exclusive alternative.

Considering Activision seems to have no interest in making (or even remaking) another Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater game, the news that the man himself is working on his own skateboarding project should be cause for excitement.

On the surface, a giant skateboard park that you can customise and edit yourself sounds amazing. The big caveat is that it’s exclusive to the metaverse and is full of the usual cryptocurrency and NFT nonsense the gaming community has come to despise.

Simply called Tony Hawk Land, it’s being built in The Sandbox, a virtual space that’s all about letting people create their own content with the potential to monetise it through the blockchain. So, it’s Roblox but far less appealing (and definitely nowhere near as well known).

Hawk himself bills it as ‘the biggest skate park in the metaverse,’ although we don’t know how impressive that really is. Are there many skate parks in the metaverse already?

More importantly, it’s not clear what Tony Hawk thinks the metaverse is. It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Facebook/Meta’s VR world, but the world is probably being used to imply a connection with other games in The Sandbox.

Or, more likely, it’s just PR people throwing around meaningless buzzwords that even they don’t understand.

A short trailer provides a glimpse at Tony Hawk Land and, conceptually speaking, it’s not a bad idea, especially since the Pro Skater games had their own skate park editors.

The trailer doesn’t explain how cryptocurrency and NFTs will be incorporated, nor does it provide a date for when Tony Hawk Land will become available.

We’ve honestly never even heard of The Sandbox before, yet it’s successful enough to have already secured partnerships with the likes of Atari and Square Enix back in 2020, at least according to its website.

This comes in the same week that Ninja Gaiden creator Tomonobu Itagaki announced his plans to capitalise on crypto with his new studio, Apex Games Studios, and his first Web3 game, named Warrior.

He hasn’t really explained what the game is about yet, though, saying only that it’s ‘Based on the gameplay of AAA games, an excellent economic system is supported to maintain a long-lasting game cycle by completing the exchange of assets in the economic model through the activities of competition, battle and exploration in the game.’

Itagaki used to work at Team Ninja as the director of the Dead Or Alive and Ninja Gaiden games before leaving in 2008 (and suing parent company Tecmo on the way out).

He set up Valhalla Game Studios and got to work on Nintendo Wii U exclusive Devil’s Third, which went on to become one of the worst games of 2015. After bringing the game’s online multiplayer to PC and then making a Japanese-only 3DS game in 2016 the studio appeared to shut down.

Itagaki announced another new studio at the beginning of this year, called Itagaki Games. It’s still unclear whether it’s just a name change or a completely new company.

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It’s a bit odd to see the likes of Hawk and Itagaki jump on the crypto/NFT bandwagon when it seems to have already peaked.

The cryptocurrency market value started to nose dive last month and cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and Dogecoin lost so much value that many investors lost literally everything they had. Only yesterday, CNBC reported that crypto company Celsius has also filed for bankruptcy.

With how the last couple of months have gone, we’re not confident that Hawk’s and Itagaki’s efforts will be an exception.

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