# How did Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 fit on a Game Boy Advance? It stored rules, not pictures.

- Series: [How It Spawns](https://miu.fm/howitspawns.md)
- Published: 2026-10-15
- Page: https://miu.fm/howitspawns/how-did-tony-hawk-s-pro-skater-2-fit-on-a-game-boy-advance

## Story

How did Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 fit on a Game Boy Advance? It stored rules, not pictures.

In 2001 Vicarious Visions brought Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 to the Game Boy Advance. Drawn the 2D way, a skater is a stack of pictures: every frame of every trick, facing every way. Karthik Bala, a co-founder of Vicarious Visions, remembers the bad news: "there's only 8 megabytes of storage. Just the animations alone would be 80 megabytes." Ten cartridges of skater, and not one ramp yet.

So the team stored rules instead. Lead programmer Matt Conte: "the way that the engine worked was basically a height map": give it an x and a y and it gives back a height. "If you were on a flat plane, it was simple. You would just say z is 0 or z is 10 or something like that. For a quarter pipe, it was a quadratic equation." In Bala's words, the ramps "were all drawn out on graph paper and measured with a ruler" and written out as formulas. The skater was drawn live in 3D every frame inside a 64 by 64 square, and "it ran at 60 frames per second."

The park, the skater and the formulas in this film are our own simplified version, built in code: our sizes, and our quarter pipe is z = u squared / 12.

Which handheld port still amazes you?

Sources: Jack Yarwood, Time Extension: "The Making Of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2's Surprisingly Stellar GBA Port" (with Matt Conte, 10 January 2025), and his interview with Karthik Bala (20 February 2026).
Not affiliated with or endorsed by Activision or Tony Hawk. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater is a trademark of Activision; Tony Hawk is a trademark of Tony Hawk.
Sounds: Apple iMovie sound effects.

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