"I don't know what's next."
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 and 4 were originally planned to be remastered like their predecessors. The news was shared by none other than skateboarding legend Tony Hawk, who was a guest on AndyTHPS' Twitch channel, a senior designer from Vicarious Visions who originally was recruited by Neversoft (through his infamous status on the early internet through sharing THPS videos) as a designer on the Tony Hawk gaming franchise.
In a short clip taken from the live stream, Tony Hawk talks about how the plan - that was in place all the way up until the release of THPS 1+2 Remastered - fell apart over time. "Even up until the release date of this, we were going 3 and 4... and then Vicarious got kind of absorbed and they were looking for other developers, and then it was over."
Someone then asks Tony if Activision didn't have any faith in a 3 and 4 remaster, to which he responded that "the truth of it was they were trying to find someone to do 3 and 4 but they just didn't really trust anyone the way they did Vicarious. So they took other pitches from other studios like 'what would you do with the THPS title?' and they didn't like anything they heard, and that was it."
Vicarious Visions was merged together with Blizzard earlier this year in April, effectively defuncting the brand. The team behind Vicarious Visions has since been working as a support studio dedicated exclusively to titles developed by Blizzard. Whether we will see any classic Vicarious Visions return in the future, remains to be seen, as our only hope seems to be the Activision Blizzard acquisition by Microsoft, as Phil Spencer - the big boss at Xbox - has stated before that he is hoping to bring back some of Activision's franchises that he loved as a kid. However, for that to even potentially happen, we would have to wait until the acquisition is completed somewhere in Microsoft's fiscal year 2023.