Tony Hawk relates how he was almost ripped off by the publisher of his game

Right before Tony Hawk's Pro Skater was released, Hawk got a call from Activision offering a "buyout" of his royalty deal and he almost took the money. "At that time in my life, someone saying half a million dollars was like a gazillion billion dollars", Hawk says on the Flagrant 2 podcast. But Hawk quickly realized what was up—the publishers had realized from early press buzz that the game was going to sell a lot more copies than the 250,000 they were banking on—and decided to keep his points instead of giving them permanent rights to use his name and image for a song. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater went on to sell millions of copies.