Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 gets offline mode, but only on Steam Deck

The critically acclaimed Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2, a remake of the classic original games, launched on PC via the Epic Games Store back in 2020, but it wasn’t until October 3, 2023 that the game came out on Steam proper.

Since then, Steam Deck users have been complaining about THPS‘s befuddling always-online requirement, which meant that any connection issues—which can be common on the go—would terminate the game outright. Just over a week later, out of the blue, Activision’s Vicarious Visions and Iron Galaxy pushed out a small patch dedicated specifically to Deck users.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2‘s patch 1.1 mentions just two Deck-specific tweaks that are very welcome indeed:

• the Deck’s keyboard overlay now works properly
• the game will now function offline for Steam Deck users

Now, while the patch notes obviously specify that Steam Deck users, in particular, can play the game offline, the obvious expectation is that this implementation would work for Steam users across the board, on any given PC. Not the case, as it turns out.

Deck-specific offline mode is a thing, turns out

While the addition of a dedicated offline mode to Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 is obviously a good thing, it’s a bit strange that the feature would be kept exclusive to Steam Deck users.

It didn’t take long at all for community members to try testing the ‘steamdeck=1 %command%’ launch command to try and bypass this lockout, as was the case with Forspoken, but this will only work for Linux users, specifically. “Can confirm it returns an error,” said Reddit user LuntiX. “I’m the user who did the testing on r/pcgaming.”

This, of course, was immediately taken as a challenge by some prospective users, with Omac setting up a Steam guide on how to enable THPS‘s offline mode on Windows PCs, too. The specific techniques used could cause issues in other games, however, so it’s a YMMV sort of thing.

Setting aside the PC gaming community’s sheer ingenuity for a bit, it is a tad strange that such obviously useful and desirable features as offline modes would be locked behind specific kinds of PCs. Because, after all, a Steam Deck is a PC. The obvious question is why would the devs block off offline mode in such a manner, and why would they go to the trouble of limiting access to it in such an egregious manner? If nothing else, the developer at least responded to the community’s request quickly, so there’s some type of silver lining to be found here.