Earlier this year I got back into the remake of the first two Tony Hawk Pro Skater games, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2 that Vicarious Visions made. It took a lot of fiddling but the game ran alright on the Steam Deck. As an Epic Game Store exclusive you could run THPS 1+2 through the Heroic Games Launcher with two big caveats: save game syncing is in beta for HGL, so that isn’t on by default so you’d also have to manually adjust a save game path with a keyboard and mouse in the HGL preferences. The second caveat was that THPS 1+2 would try and go online every few minutes and then momentarily freeze the game. Not fun, but it was tolerable because the game is so good.
Until, surprisingly, THPS 1+2’s exclusivity came to an end earlier this month and it came out on Steam, you could finally play on the Steam Deck without fiddling. It’s still a non-native port, but THPS 1+2 was almost fantastic on the Steam Deck. It had to be always online, but that was a minor inconvenience unless you were traveling.
Today, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2 got an update for the Steam Deck to play offline and so the keyboard overlay works better on the Deck.
It looks like Iron Galaxy did the work to update Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2 for Steam, since Vicarious Visions has been handed over to the Blizzard half of Activision Blizzard and unfortunately cancelled Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3+4 along with any other games Vicarious was working on that weren’t Blizzard titles.