Doomguy is one ultra talented space marine. Unstoppable killing machine, friend to animals, ollie master—what can’t he do? I’m currently on my fifth watch of Doom Slayer’s Pro Skater, an excellent video that finds Doomguy doing a different sort of shredding across E1M1, except in Tony Hawk’s Underground.
The video is from back in 2020, but creator Low Poly Depression recently resurfaced it with some relatable context: “I made this when the pandemic hit and I was losing my mind.” It’s a short but sweet two minutes of Doomguy skating, spinning, and grinding chains in hell before smashing his skateboard into pieces.
There appear to be a few mods in use here, including E1M1 and the 2016 Doom Slayer model. I can’t track down the second map featured in the video, but maybe some longtime Tony Hawk players can identify it. The base game is THUG Pro, a free mod extension for 2004’s Tony Hawk’s Underground 2 that enables adding characters and levels. The mod community is still very much active: here’s a Leon Kennedy model someone added just days ago, for example.
As fun as Tony Hawk mods are, I hope the recent resurgence of skateboarding games takes us back to the glory days of inexplicable official cameos, minigames and questionable licensed products. Was The Simpsons Skateboarding a good videogame? Absolutely not. Was it canon-appropriate for Solid Snake to go skateboarding around Big Shell? Probably not, though Kojima works in mysterious ways. Was the PC version of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 better because Doomguy was secretly playable with a cheat code? Unquestionably.
I’m just saying, the world was in a better place when videogame executives demanded Shrek guest star in Tony Hawk to hype up the upcoming Shrek 2 tie-in game. It was a purer time.
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