The idea in the 8th Tony Hawk skater game is to rank up amongst all the competing skaters until you've broken through onto the very elite tier at which point Tony himself will draft you into his lineup to make some videos or something. You advance by completing challenges across a large interconnected skate fun fair that combines areas from existing Pro Skater titles. Criticism was mostly leveled at the absence of a multiplayer mode across the PS systems.
Best Single-segment Time: 0:37:24 by 'ThePackle' on 2023-01-17
Author's comments:
Tony Hawk's Project 8 (also known as THP8 or just simply P8) is the eighth mainline game in the Tony Hawk's franchise and was Neversoft's penultimate game before the series was handed over to another studio. The game was originally developed by Neversoft for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 and released on November 7, 2006; an altered version was also released on the PlayStation 2 and original Xbox by Shaba Games and also released on November 7, 2006; and a PlayStation Portable version was developed by Page 44 Studios and released on November 21, 2006.
Project 8 departs from the previous three entries and has no central story, instead focusing on challenges, collecting sponsors, impressing locals, and rising an in-game leaderboard to join Tony Hawk's new "Project 8" team. We begin at rank 200 and are gradually given access to a large open world to complete objectives at our leisure. Gaps, secret spot tokens, spot challenges, and regular objectives by NPCs are how we rank up - and we do it blazingly fast.
RTA time is 37:24 and is based on gaining control after the opening cutscene and ending upon seeing the "Goal: Complete" screen after completing Tony Hawk's Pro Goal at the end of the game to reach the credits. As of submitting, this is the any% world record for single-segment attempts.
Special shoutouts to Fog for helping develop the original routes back in 2016, helping push the game in its early days, and becoming a rival as we worked to figure this game out. Additional shoutouts to Rock-er21, Hekigan, finness, and BSGRIND for helping develop new strategies within the last few months, finding new routes, and helping motivate me to push this game down even further. Still got some other categories to take care of soon enough. ;)
This is played on the 360 version of the game on the 1.0 (or "down-patched") version of the game. The PS3 version has a more locked-down framerate of 30, has constant stutters and lag, cannot utilize "profile-less" (I'll discuss this in the next section), and has a higher tendency to crash. At some point after launch, Neversoft developed a patch for the 360 version to lockdown the framerate to 30. However, the patched version is slower by a significant margin and hardly prevents lag, so it is pretty useless in speedruns.
An additional note is that I am playing this game on a 360 released towards the beginning of the console's lifespan. Several dashboard updates were released during the 360's time, and it was found that the Blades dashboard has significantly less lag versus the later versions. However, a downside is that you cannot install the game on the hard drive, resulting in much higher loading times. Ultimately, the Blades dashboard will result in fewer crashes and less overall lag, but will result in losing time on load screens; meanwhile, the Metro dashboard will have slightly more crashes and a lot more lag but will gain a lot of it back on load screens. In short, Blades is consistent and allows you to play the game, Metro might make you pull your hair out due to insane lag.
Before we get to the individual areas of the game, I want to discuss a few powerful glitches and glitches we utilize in the run.
Now that we have all of the pre-requisite knowledge out of the way, let us begin!
First thing we do is perform a double-buttslap to the top of the tree to get the first secret spot token. Depending on the angle, you can also pick up the Planter Hop gap, but there are plenty of backup gaps if we fail to get it. After we get the token and the gap, we are prompted to see the "leaderboard," which we obviously decline. Then, we proceed to speak to the camera girl for our first goal.
After dropping down to gain speed, we jump straight over the fence and proceed into a manual. Most of the photo girl goals are easy to trick in this game, with harder difficulties being fairly easy to cheese if you know what you're doing. As long as we keep the fence jump in a combo, we can do a 180-flip trick at any point and it will count.
Next, we have the first spot challenge goal, having us grind a little bit around the cul-de-sac. We do a couple of Darkslides (our default special grind trick) to grind (pun intended) out some stat increases. After dropping down and landing, the game counts us grinding to the AM marker, we pause and retry the last goal. This puts us closer to do a quick natas spot challenge goal. Then, we retry once more and proceed to the backyard.
Dad (who may not be our Dad? Lore is weird with Tony Hawk) asks us to catch some golf balls he hits over the fence. This goal introduces us to more mechanics of Tony Hawk, but is ultimately not too hard to pull off.
Once we are done helping (our?) Dad, we jump up to the top of our house to grab the second secret spot token and go to the camera guy so he can show us how to get into the next area. If you fastplant onto a wall, force a bail (LT + LB + RT + RB), then mash X and A, we can quickly skip a lot of the "slow-mo" parts of this goal. Plus, if you do it right, you can get a goofy animation of your character flailing on the fence. :)
After getting into the skate park, we do the first video goal and knock it out quickly. Then, we go see Rodney Mullen for our first pro challenge (and also the only required one in the game). For Rodney, we don't need to perform Nail-The-Tricks (NTT) over the ramp he made, we can just do it from the start! We just perform the tricks he calls out, and we are done!
After mashing out of his text, we perform a trick called Phone Skip to warp us semi-quickly to the top of the park and ensure we have no more phone notifications for the rest of the run. Once we load back in, we do some shifty movement and goal-warping to wrap up the first skate park section. In esscence, by doing what we did and quitting out when a required phone pop up would appear, the game gets confused and stops showing the phone for the entire run!
When we perform the wallplant, we head into an elevator that takes us to the top of the hill. Here, we grab another secret spot token, do a manual down for a spot challenge, and quickly set up for the RC car jump. And, as is tradition with Tony Hawk games, the RC car has a terrible hitbox. It is something I can only describe as "feel," since the hitbox seems to be disjointed from the car; you have to aim slightly left from where you think it would be. But, first try, and onto Main Street!
Main Street is when the game really opens up, but first, we have to talk to Jason Lee. After we perform his goal and get skaters excited, we have access to a few new areas. Each of the goals have a good amount of micro-optimizations to save time or put us in a more advantegous position.
The first goal I will note here is that we are now taking our cousin's advice and going bowling... And, honestly, this is the worst goal in the game. Insanely easy to do for AM and PRO rankings, but I am not looking forward to this when I get around to 100% and another Rank 1 run. The reason it is hard - and I apologize for the sidetrack from the run, I just need to vent - is because you need to knock down all 10 pins AND get $50,000 on a hospital bill in a single run AND you have an insanely small area to do it. I've tried for years to find a consistent setup, but have yet to find one that works. :(
Anyways, back on track, another nifty trick is how we take advantage of the game physics. When you land from a high ledge onto your board, the game world has a mini-earthquake(?) around your general area. Bowling pins ARE affected by this shake and will knock over before you even get to them. This means that, with a well-placed jump, we can knock out all the pins easily AND make it very consistent!
A more recent route adjustment is the removal of Paul Rodriguez's pro challenge from the route. Usually, you would do the next couple of goals later, but P-Rod is inconsistent due to how the camera is positioned half of the time (which messes up your inputs) and he has a decent chance of soft locking at the end of his second section. I discovered that removing him, moving some goals around, and adding in another pro challenge later doesn't lose any time versus the P-Rod route (unless you had a perfect P-Rod which, after eight years, I have only had like a dozen times).
The first classic goal just went through a re-route by community member finness - he figured out you could buttslap into a wallride and jump to the coffee cup above the area. If you mash too hard, you lose your angle, but a quick retry goal will put you back in a good position. After getting to the cup, you drop back down and you have to get 400,000 points. Usually, spamming Darkslides and Fingerflip Airwalks would get you the points, but I royally messed up the inputs here and still (somehow) got enough points without losing time.
There isn't a whole lot to talk about here. There were a few adjustments to the route made by finness over the last few months that cleaned up some awkward movement, but this area doesn't have anything super crazy to comment about and went according to plan.
Capitol doesn't have a lot of interesting things going for it either. The biggest thing would probably be that we are introduced to the first bail goal that has us breaking our bones. To go along with my mini-rant earlier, breaking bones is similarly evil and inconsistent. If you do the same exact bail goal with the same inputs, you will have different (or, sometimes, insanely different) results. You could have different launches, speeds, and landings. Depending on how you land, the position of your control stick, your speed, and the terrain, it can result in 0 bones broken all the way to 15 - the more bones broken, the bigger your fake hospital bill is. Currently, there is no known way to manipulate this.
The only notable time loss in this section is not getting at least 3 bones broken on the aforementioned bail goal. I had to quickly move the ragdoll towards the building to get a few more bones broken, which does lose a bit of time overall.
Now that we are back in Main Street, we clean up a few more goals on our way over to the School. The School is the next area we need to unlock and progress the game, but we quickly see that a security guard is blocking us from getting in. Talking to the guard is required; after talking to him, the Colonel spawns near the Capitol to tell us a secret plan that will ultimately ring the school bell.
There aren't any issues with this area, though it does use goal-warping a few times to get us in a better position for the next goal. Goals are scattered, but sometimes begin (or end) next to one another, so goal-warping makes this a lot more efficient!
The Colonel's goal is to get into the main Capitol building and get some sort of document. Afterward, he has us leave and go activate the bell to cause a distraction for him. For the first part of the goal, once we get over the main door, we drop down right and begin to grind across the documents. Usually, I would perform a triple-buttslap to jump to the documents and save a few seconds, but my timing was off the few days before performing this run, so I opted for the safer method of doing so. If you mess up the buttslap hard enough or have a bad angle, you will land in the lasers and instantly fail the goal - and there is no retry goal in the menu either!
Once we rail down the security cameras and grind to the bell in the center of Main Street, School is let out and we have access to the next area and our second pro - Daeawon Song! And, once we accomplish his goal, we head off to School!
Oh boy, School. Where do I begin with this level?
This is the level that has the most issues on later dashboards. There are FOUR loading zone triggers in the area - one each for Slums, Main Street, Skate Park, and Suburbia. If you are far enough away from an area, the game culls it and only reloads it when you get past a loading trigger. What is problematic is that the trigger for Suburbia AND Skate Park are on the same stretch of area in School, which means hitting it will cause a lag spike and a severe amount of framerate drops. My Blades console has some issues with this, but it can almost stop entirely on the newer dashboard iterations.
Usually there is something that can go wrong with our first visit, but I was lucky to get away with just a few very, very minor movement mistakes. There are a few optimizations here by Hekigan and finness that make things a bit more consistent.
With our second visit to Suburbia, we are picking up a few goals we couldn't get on our first time around and completing a few goals that were unlocked as we ranked up. This entire level was re-routed by finness not too long before this run, saving a good amount of time overall. Between a quicker NTT segment, the classic goal re-route, AND the goal re-route, finness saved a lot of time here and made the movement a lot cleaner.
The only major mistake I made here was during the photo girl's goal in the pools. If you powerslide, you can get to a secret spot token above the pools with a triple-buttslap. Unfortunately, I messed it up and reverted to the safer method of gaining speed and performing a double-buttslap. It is a pretty silly mistake, and one I don't usually mess up.
After we get the pool goal done, we shmoove on over to Skate Park for our second visit!
We aren't here for long - just two goals. It may look like we are going out of the way for these two goals, but they are 4 ranks combined AND we can get them in around 40 seconds. The first goal is a simple photo goal, with the second being another classic goal. This classic goal used to be a bit more awkward to complete, but finness found an alternate route - just keep a combo to the secret disc, then head on back to the beginning. It doesn't look fast, but it is definitely faster than the older methods we had (plus menuing can be very slow with classic goals).
Now this is where the pain can begin. Know those loading triggers I was talking about? What if I told you that you had a few goals to complete while also dealing with those triggers? And, what if I told you that this game also loves to drop inputs on lag frames? :)
The second visit isn't insanely long, but it does have one of the more aggravating goals in the game. If you get it first try, it looks cool AND you get a lot of height to go to the top of the buildings; miss and it sucks. The manual down to the wallride is right in the middle of a loading trigger, so you are very likely to lose frames and/or inputs when attempting the wallride. Additionally, if you have a bad angle, adjusting is also difficult. But, I was able to get through it fine!
The rest of the section goes according to plan, then we head over to the nerd to help with his science project (and unlock Slums!). This goal is
weird
and is very hard to keep good speed. There are a lot of obstacles that are just in the way, and there isn't a lot to grind on to gain speed on the third part of the goal.
With the lack of grinding spots, we have to resort to a different method to keep speed - staying in the air. Unlike other Tony Hawk games, you want to stay out of the air as much as possible, but it is very important for keeping speed in Project 8. When you are riding on flat ground, you will gradually reduce in speed - something that changed from American Wasteland and earlier games - and the best way to keep speed is to do little bunny hops to your destination. We can't do this everywhere, and rail hopping is superior, but it does squeeze out a little more time in segments by doing this.
With Slums unlocked, we momentarily head towards the edge of Main Street to get two goals before swinging back around for Slums.
Slums is probably the second-hardest segment in the run. When it goes well, it goes well; when it goes horribly wrong, oh man are you going to lose a lot of time. Outside of Suburbia 1, Slums is probably the second highest in terms of "real" resets - runs WILL die in Slums.
Every other goal has a chance to ruin your run if you aren't careful, the highlights being Slums classic and Bam Margera's pro challenge. Slums classic was recently re-routed by (again) finness to remove an NTT I did at the end of a long combo to get 800,000 points, instead opting for Fingerflip Airwalk to Darkslides as the primary source of comboing (with a triple-buttslap to get a double-backflip to get enough points :^)). And, as for Bam, Hekigan figured out a very consistent way of doing his goal; instead of just going down the chute and praying the bail RNG is in your favor, you can stop your momentum, jump, and get it very easily.
There were a handful of minor movement mistakes through the run - for example, I messed up the grind to start the grind spot challenge and I failed a double-buttslap on the photo girl's goal and had to retry to do it the normal way. But, even with a few issues, it went relatively well for how brutal Slums can be.
One final note is that Hekigan found a new trick for the factory goal that looks weird. After completing the first part and hitting the levers, we are supposed to bank drop the barriers to allow the cars to crash into the wall. If you retry the goal after doing this, the game just proceeds to the next checkpoint. Do it twice and it proceeds to the final part where you are also supposed to make a ramp so you can bail into the wall. I don't do that and just bail like normal into it. It is a little finicky, which is why it didn't work the first time, so I opted to jump off the kicker and bail that way.
We aren't here long, so enjoy it. After performing the first few goals with minimal issue, we have to perform a triple-buttslap to clip through the floor on the top half of the level, then do another double-buttslap to grab the secret spot token. Both go decently well and we don't have any more hitches until Factory classic.
Factory classic is hard - we need to get 1,000,000 points to complete the Sick score - and we gotta do it fast. The combo we do up the cages usually gives us a good multiplier, but I make a huge mistake with how I usually get points. When going down for the acid drop, I perform a triple kickflip instead of opting to extend the Christ Air - this, in turn, reduced the number of points I could get. Additionally, I had a pretty bad rotation for the Sacktap and second Christ Air which only gave me 863,746 points. Since I already used my more impressive moves, I had to opt for a simple - and very slow - combo to get the points I needed. Definitely can do this section a lot better.
We retry the goal and proceed to Stevie & Dustin's combo pro challenge - our final of the game! This one is pretty simple, but a recent discovery by Hekigan shows you can get the points you need and then hit the retry goal. The game will count your previous combo, even if it was impossible for you to land, as long as you go past that skater's threshold!
After Stevie & Dustin's goal, we are back in City Park to pick up literally one goal and one secret spot token before we head to the Capitol. Nothing of note here.
Huge props to finness for finding a few new strats for the Capitol classic goal - though, I did add my own spin on things. The old route had us go around to grab the COMBO letters, but we instead opt to get the secret disc and keep a long combo to get the Sick score. Going up the sides of the capitol building is weird, but isn't too hard once you get the hang of it. There is a much more difficult route that finness found that saves around two seconds, but tends to not work properly. So, for consistency's sake, I stayed with this strategy. After we are done, we are at Hilltop for the endgame!
Hilltop was recently re-routed to remove a longer goal - the Hilltop Get There goal - but a caveat is that we have a hard rank check at the end - if we do not have rank 60 by the end, we will not have Fun Park open.
There isn't much to talk about that isn't already self-explanatory. There were no major issues with this section of the run, just a lot of optimization found by the community that made things more consistent or easier!
Fun Park is anything but. There are a lot of runs that can die here. Practically every goal can backfire hard and lose you a lot of time, and it is all culminated by an annoying bail goal, an annoying double-buttslap, and the Fun Park classic goal. I could spend paragraphs describing every minor issue, but I will save you the trouble (this time).
Another note is that the opening goal for Fun Park - the one where we light the dragon - is also really weird. Originally it was concluded by Fog that the roller coaster's global cycle messes up the dragon lighting. But, for whatever reason, all we have to do is jump off the grind to the dragon's scales, then jump back and grind up. It will work pretty much every time, but there is a backup if we need to do that.
The worst mistake of this section is after the photo goal in the bowls at the back of the park. After you do the 540 grab spine transfer, you need to angle yourself and do a double-buttslap to get the next spot token. Not only do I miss it, but I also hesitate because I am processing whether I could go for a backup spot token. However, I had not practiced that one nearly enough, so I elected to retry and go for it again.
The only other thing that didn't go according to plan was the Fun Park classic goal. The global cycle of the roller coaster caught me at the worst time, so I had to wait an extra few seconds for it to hit the apex of the coaster before I could continue. If I went too early, I would not be able to make the final jump to the spot token and the secret disc (or bail).
Nerves started to get me here, if I am honest, and you could tell with the video goal. I messed up the inputs slightly, forcing me to go with a slower ending to the goal than I would've liked. Besides that, everything else went okay as we head to Tony for the final goal!
If you want to know why I jumped ahead so many ranks after the theatre roof goal, just look in the "Main Glitches and Tricks" section and look for "Project 8 Early".
To join Project 8, we have to help Tony get the crowd excited. This is a two-minute auto-scroller for a goal type we skip in the run (Demos), so this is kind of the period where you can calm your nerves (or let them get worse) before you go for one of the hardest tricks in the ENTIRE franchise.
The second section is that we need to follow Jason Lee and perform 20 tricks (static order, just like the video goals we've seen in the run) and skate around School, Main Street, Capitol, and City Park. When we get to the arch in the Capitol, we go into focus and perform a quintuple-buttslap (nerves helped, I am sure) to fly to the top of Hilltop and just barely hit the trigger next to Tony. Once we do so, we go into the final section!
This final section is the most recently optimized. Finness learned you can do a late stall instead of a lip, and the game would still count it. Additionally, you can jump off and immediately perform a 540 flip or grab trick (whichever the game calls for next). I also learned you can jump off a little early (but not too early) to save some more time.
And, then, finally, we do a 12000-point NTT to finish everything off!
Welcome to Project 8!