26 years ago today, Sony launched its first skater game – Grind Session. However, it quickly remained in the shadow of the then popular THPS series.
Although Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games were synonymous with skating on the PlayStation, we also had a number of other titles of that type. Street Sk8er, Trasher and Grind Session were some of those titles, and it was this last one that we played on this day in 2000.
Grind Session was published by Sony Computer Entertainment and was Sony’s first skateboarding game. It had six real skaters who did not pledge allegiance to Tony Hawk, such as Cara-Beth Burnside, Daewon Song, Willy Santos and others. Skated mostly in American locations, from New York, Detroit, Atlanta and others.
While Grind Session wasn’t a bad game (it actually got very good reviews), it didn’t offer anything new or different after the first THPS. And then only a few months later came the iconic THPS2, which threw this game into total oblivion.
However, the Shaba Games development team, for whom this was the first game, managed to attract the attention of the publishing house Activision and later developed for them Matt Hoffman Pro BMX and the PS1 port of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3.