Variants
There was a very small print run before it went to Greatest Hits where Activision added a blurb about the game’s EGM Silver Rating to the bottom right corner. It appears only the manual was updated visually – the disc art and back insert appear to be the same.
Misprints
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2’s misprint history is fairly amusing due to a poor graphic design choice. When you’re designing artwork that has imagery extending past the edge of the paper (a ‘bleed’), there is what’s called a “live area” from the edge of the paper inward to where important assets need to stop. This live area is an invisible area that acts as a buffer between the intended design and where a machine will trim off the excess ‘bleed’ artwork.
In Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2’s case – the first skater name Muska at the top of the name arc breaks the safety margin and got caught in both the printer shift and the bleed cut.
This happened all over the place with THPS2 – so much so that I can’t even really call it a misprint as it’s just “the print”. The manuals – both Black Label and Greatest Hits – run the gamut of ‘Just right’ to ‘Literally cut off the M’. I’ve illustrated that in the image below. I have a correct version not pictured but inbound.
That said, here’s the Greatest Hits Release of it! You can track all the Greatest Hist by clicking here.
Greatest Hits Release
Sadly, the follies don’t end. At one point a reprint of Tony Hawk and Action Bass collided, causing the physical disc of Tony Hawk 2 to have the actual game of Action Bass on it. The good news is this is actually easy to identify thanks to the Greatest Hits’s disc lack of a color image covering the inner ring. Look in the inner ring (circled in red below) and if you spot the backwards PSRM of 202080, that’s Action Bass! A proper disc will have the backwards PSRM-0173000.
If you love these kinds of items, check out I AM ERROR’s web-site. He tracks all kinds of misprints across every known system!
