this is off the topic, but my favorite game that is similar to the Tony Hawk games would be Dave Mirra's Freestyle BMX, and Dave Mirra's Freestyle BMX 2. Man, those were awesome games! I wish I still had them! I would always get someone that rode an S&M.
Mario Kart for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, or, as sim, Grand Prix 2 -> Grand Prix 3 -> Grand Tourismo -> Grand Tourismo 3 -> Grand Prix 4 -> Grand Tourismo 4 -> LFS + rFactor - or something like that
First racing game I ever played was Need For Speed Hot Pursuit in 1999. Back then I was something like 6 or 7 years old and since that game I got hooked. Now when I'm not driving my real car I race on my PC and PS3 or I'm building 1:16s.
Me and my brother worked together for weeks trying to complete that game. We were almost 100% complete, but there was one car that we had to buy to enter one more race. And we couldn't find the car. We were quite upset, to say the least.
1984 - REVS, a Formula 3 simulator that debuted on the BBC Micro platform in 1984. Unbelievably this was written in less than 32kb and was as smooth as silk. Happy memories
As far as i can remember I played it back 1998, few years after the war passed on territory of Ex-Yugoslavia and Bosnia and Herzegovina got little bit better and my family bought computer, again. Few years after that I got Pentium 3 and played NFS4 :X, didn't know about GPL, internet wasn't so popular, hehe