Gaming Pundit Defends Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 as Best Game Ever Over Zelda

Jeff Grubb, a gaming industry analyst, posted a single sentence on Twitter that set off a chain reaction across the internet. "Pretty mad at all of you still for acting like I'm crazy for suggesting Tony Hawk for best game of all time," he wrote. The backlash was swift and substantial. Grubb had committed what felt to many like a cardinal sin: he had argued that Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 deserved the top ranking in gaming history, a position currently occupied by The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

The timing made the offense feel sharper. Nintendo had just released Tears of the Kingdom, the sequel to the critically acclaimed Breath of the Wild, and the gaming world was in the grip of Zelda fervor. Into that moment stepped Grubb's contrarian take, and the internet responded with the kind of heat reserved for opinions that challenge deeply held consensus.

Ocarina of Time, released by Nintendo in November 1998 for the Nintendo 64, carries the weight of genuine historical significance. It arrived at a moment when open-world game design was still being invented, and it helped define what that genre could be. The game sits at a Metacritic score of 99, a near-perfect rating that reflects both critical acclaim and lasting cultural influence. Its DNA runs through countless games released in the decades since. It is, by most measures, considered a masterpiece and a turning point in how games could be structured and experienced.

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2, by contrast, arrived two years later in 2000. Developed by Neversoft and published by Activision for the PlayStation, it was a sports game—specifically, a skateboarding simulation that became a cultural phenomenon in its own right. It revolutionized how sports games were made and played, particularly among young adults. The game earned a Metacritic score of 98, just one point behind Ocarina of Time. That single-point gap became the crux of Grubb's argument: the two games are separated by almost nothing in critical estimation, yet one is universally crowned the king and the other is treated as a footnote.

What Grubb seemed to be pushing at was a question that the gaming community has never fully resolved: how do you measure "best" across different eras and different genres? Ocarina of Time changed what games could be structurally and narratively. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 changed what a licensed sports game could achieve culturally and commercially. One is an RPG that pioneered open-world design. The other is a sports game that became a pop icon. They are not the same kind of achievement, and they are not the same kind of game.

The online response split predictably. Some defended Grubb's right to hold an unconventional opinion, acknowledging that the Metacritic scores were indeed separated by a single point and that both games had fundamentally shaped gaming in different ways. Others treated the suggestion as heresy, defending Ocarina of Time's legacy and its undeniable influence on the medium. The debate itself became the story—not because anyone's mind was likely to change, but because it exposed how gaming culture ranks its own history and what criteria matter most when we talk about greatness.

What remained unresolved was whether Grubb was making a genuine argument about game design and cultural impact, or whether he was simply enjoying the friction of a provocative take. Either way, the conversation had moved beyond the two games themselves and into the deeper question of how a medium measures its own past.