Tony Hawk 1 was a good and groundbreaking game in its own right, but in the eyes of history, it's more or less just the alley-oop pass setting up the backboard-shattering slam dunk that is THPS2.

The list of major and minor improvements made to the framework of the original is almost absurdly long, resulting in a tight, polished, and overwhelmingly addictive experience. Most improved is probably the level design, transforming the sometimes disjointed (or, worse, linear) experiences from THPS into dense playgrounds that are a joy to just roll through and explore - especially for the first time, as you design lines in your head, theorize about possible gaps, and wonder, "how the hell am I going to get up there?". It's completely evident that these guys had just as much fun making the areas as you have playing in them. And it's also clear that all of the big additions to the core game - createable characters, creatable skate parks(!!!), earning money for new stats and tricks, the implementation of the manual which blows the entire gameplay wide open - were things they had in their head from the last one but couldn't implement. This was almost certainly the game they wanted to make in the first place.

The secrets are numerous. The replayability is infinite. The soundtrack ... is beyond perfect. The art makes the PS1's grainy graphics sing. I've got a couple stray gripes - about it feeling like it needs one more grand finale level, or wishing the unlockables structure was less grindy - but they mostly feel dumb in the face of such era-defining quality.

One of the most impressive iterative sequels ever. 1 loaded the bases; 2 was the grand slam.