Back in the '90s and '00s, seeing a home console game ported to a handheld platform usually resulted in something absolutely dreadful, but somehow, the Game Boy Advance versions of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater turned out to be essential parts of that platform's library. These ports exist, in part, simply because developer Vicarious Visions was deep in debt and desperately needed something to keep the company afloat.
Karthik Bala founded Vicarious Visions alongside his brother in 1991, and the pair spent years working on various passion projects before starting to take on various bits of contract work. Those projects included things like a Game Boy Color port of Activision's Spider-Man game. But by 2000, things at the 45-person studio had started to look dire – a major contract had fallen through, and the company suddenly couldn't make payroll.
