When Tony Hawk launched his namesake video-game series a decade ago on Sony's PlayStation, he figured it might be a niche game that skateboarders could enjoy. Ten years and more than 12 sequels later, "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater" is a kick-flipping institution, with Hawk's name standing as a sports gaming brand rivalled only by John Madden.

And Hawk - as seemingly easygoing and laid-back as one might expect from a man who made millions as a professional skateboarder - never saw it coming.

"No, not at all," he told The Canadian Press in a recent telephone interview from his California office. "I mean, when we did the first game, I really thought it was something that skaters would enjoy and maybe would be inspired to buy a game system to play it. "But I didn't think that the video-game community would embrace it so passionately because skating was a fringe sport, at the time.

But Hawk figures that has changed too, and he reluctantly accepts some of the credit. "Absolutely, I think that people started appreciating skating in a different light once they started playing the game and learned the nuances and technical aspects of what skateboarding is," he said.

"I think it created a fanbase for skating more than anything. You know, it definitely inspired kids to try skating, but moreover it actually had people wanting to watch it on television. And enjoying what they saw, as opposed to before, where the only people who liked skating were skaters themselves."

The "Pro Skater" series initially brought gamers into realistic urban settings, then let them do entirely unrealistic things while mashing their thumbs into oblivion.

You could ollie up and grind almost any surface, or ride a ramp and soar into the sky before pulling off an impossibly elaborate string of aerial manoeuvres (all of this was accompanied by a certified-cool soundtrack of California punk and underground hip-hop).

But the once-bulletproof formula began to show its age after years and years of sequels.

So Hawk decided it was time to pursue an idea he'd been kicking around for years: releasing a game that comes with a skateboard peripheral. The result is "Tony Hawk: Ride," which was released last month for the PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii and Xbox 360.

"With the onset of wireless technology and accelerometers, and people embracing peripheral-based games, I thought this is the time to do it," he said.

The game hasn't exactly been getting sparkling notices - in fact, it's received an average review score of 48 according to aggregator Metacritic.com.

Hawk has been playing the game at every stage of its development - and he took on some Canadian gamers online during a recent promotion with Xbox Live - and says he really likes it, though he figures that the next game in the series might feature slightly more polished software.

"I think that we could really do a lot more with the levels," he said.

"(The) software came together faster than the actual hardware did. . . . But I don't want to say that we didn't have time to make the software good, I really like the software. What I would like to do is make the games for this same piece of hardware.

"That was sort of my master plan of doing something like this."

While the 41-year-old retired from professional skateboarding in 1999, he still skates regularly (and he landed another 900 - the two-and-a-half-revolution aerial spin that Hawk was the first skater to pull off - at a recent Quicksilver show in Paris).

He was disappointed by the news that skateboarding won't be featured at the 2012 Olympic Games in London, but says he's hopeful that the sport will be included in the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro.

"I think it has a good chance, and I think it should be (included) - I think it should have been a long time ago," he said. "Skating is vastly more popular than many Olympic sports in terms of participation and popularity, so I don't see why they wouldn't include it."