Mat Hoffman’s Pro BMX - On This Day

The somewhat unexpected success of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series has opened the door to other virtualizations of extreme sports, primarily BMX video games. 20 years ago, only Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX existed in that style, but Activision hired the then most popular BMX driver and in 2001 launched Mat Hoffman’s Pro BMX.

The game used a THPS game launcher and shared more similarities with them, and that was by no means a bad thing. Most players found out about this game through the demo version that was included in THPS2 on the PlayStation. The central mode was a career that could be played with eight different BMX riders through ten different levels among which two were reworked from Pro Skater games. In addition to his career, there were several multiplayer modes and Park Editor.

Matt Hoffman’s Pro BMX is, along with THPS, the only Activism extreme sports game to have a sequel. Such luck was not the games of Shaun Palmer and Kelly Slater. While the first part was done for the original PlayStation, the sequel jumped to deuce and remained the last part in the series. Matt Hoffman himself subsequently appeared only in later THPS games.

Although skateboarding has recently come back to life with the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 remaster, it is not very likely that the same could happen with this BMX series.