Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 for Game Boy Color is a 2001 skateboarding game developed by HotGen and published by Activision. It is the Game Boy Color version of the third entry in the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series, but it is built as its own handheld adaptation rather than a reduced copy of the contemporaneous 3D console games. The single-player cartridge brings Tony Hawk and a roster of professional street and vert skaters to a compact Color Game Boy format centered on trick scoring, course navigation, and repeatable runs.

The basic aim is to ride through a skate environment, use ramps and features for jumps, and link tricks together to raise a score. Players can choose from the featured skaters, whose abilities differ in areas such as spin and balance, so the choice of rider affects how a run handles. Familiar series ideas such as using the terrain to launch into tricks and chasing a larger point total remain at the center of the experience, while the portable format gives the game a much more linear structure.

Instead of the free-roaming 3D parks associated with other versions of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3, this Game Boy Color release presents side-scrolling courses. Its routes are not limited to one flat lane: several tracks run beside one another, and ramps can move the skater between them. That layout makes timing and route selection part of each attempt, as players look for opportunities to keep moving, reach another path, and use the available scenery to improve their score.

Career mode forms the campaign, taking a selected skater through nine levels. The game also includes Single Session, a timed mode focused on building as many points as possible before the clock expires, plus Free Skate for practicing without the career structure. Together, the three modes support both directed progression and shorter score-focused sessions, which suits a game designed for the Game Boy Color's portable play.

The licensed lineup includes Tony Hawk alongside skateboarders such as Elissa Steamer, Jamie Thomas, Steve Caballero, Rune Glifberg, Geoff Rowley, Andrew Reynolds, Rodney Mullen, Eric Koston, Chad Muska, Bucky Lasek, and Bam Margera. Their presence connects the cartridge to the professional-skater identity of the larger series, even as HotGen reshapes the presentation and level design for the hardware. The result is a side-view and top-down-leaning take on skateboarding action rather than the polygonal approach used by the home-console editions.

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 Game Boy Color arrived during a wide multi-platform release for the series, with separate teams handling different versions. HotGen's edition is notable for preserving the series' score-chasing skateboarding premise through a single-player, side-scrolling course design. For players exploring the Game Boy Color library, it documents one of the ways an early-2000s sports franchise was adapted around the system's screen, controls, and cartridge-scale format.