When the “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater” franchise returns with new installment “3 + 4” on July 11, it’s bringing Jack Black back with it.
The “A Minecraft Movie” star is returning to the skate-boarding video game series in a reprisal of his role as Officer Dick from 2020’s “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2,” which was a remake of the original run’s first and second games. And now, Black is playing Dick’s U.K. twin, Constable Richard, as well.
Per “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4” publisher Activision, in his youth, “Richard Ennvee was mocked by other skaters and called a ‘poser.’ Overtaken by the need for revenge, Dick vowed to one day become what those skaters feared most – the long arm of the law!”
“So we really loved Jack Black’s inclusion in the previous iteration [‘Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2’]. He played a character called Officer Dick, and in the school maps, he was this school security guard who would yell at the skater and try and run them off the grounds,” game director Kurt Tillmanns told Variety. “We just thought that was a really fun, interesting character and kept in this tradition of the celebrity cameo in a ‘Tony Hawk’ game. We wanted to carry that forward; we were really thankful he we reached out to him and he was down to to come back, but we wanted to tell a little bit more of the Officer Dick story.”
Tillmanns explained that he and the team at Iron Galaxy refactored some goals from the original “Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4,” where a character named Officer Tom was running for campus security sheriff at a college, to bring Officer Dick back in.
“We can’t tell all these highly intricate stories in the game, but behind the scenes, we’re thinking, this is an interesting evolution of Officer Dick’s midlife crisis of hating the skater,” Tillmanns said. “In the last one, he’s just on this high school ground, and trying to yell at the skaters, control the skaters. And now he’s evolved, as his power trip has gone into becoming the campus security sheriff of a college. We wanted to bring him back and put our own stamp on it in that way and we’re really happy that he was absolutely game to do that.”
And across the pond, Dick’s doppelgänger Constable Richard (voiced by Black doing a British accent) is terrorizing the skating youth in the U.K. in the game’s London level.
Speaking to the options for changes of scenery, Iron Galaxy’s Tillmanns explained his love for the “Tony Hawk” video game franchise’s history (across other developers including Neversoft and Vicarious Visions) of letting you skate in some “crazy, fantastical spaces.”
“I think it’s now more diverse in its settings and where it can go and what it can do,” he said. “One thing that especially ‘Tony Hawk’ games can do that is unique to any other skating game, is they can really put you into these crazy, fantastical spaces. So one of the new levels that we made is pinball, where you’re actually like a tiny pinball-sized skater in this massive pinball machine. And there’s kind of a history of that in ‘Tony Hawk’ games, taking the skater and putting them into these fantastic places. And we hear a lot from the pros how influential it is to be skating in these larger-than-life environments in the video game; that it’s inspirational for them to go out into the real world and find things and skate on things that they otherwise wouldn’t have thought to do. So it’s very interesting that we can somehow influence real-life skaters.”
Get a sneak peek at Black’s roles as Officer Dick and Constable Richard in the “Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 + 4” teaser footage in the video above.