In the Nintendo 64 version of the game, two cheat codes can be activated on the pause menu that will each cause a picture of an unknown woman to appear in the top-right corner of the screen. Both pictures only get cleared from the screen upon returning to the main menu or changing levels, and inputting each code will cause one picture to overwrite the other:

•Holding L and pressing C-Left/C-Down/C-Right/C-Left/C-Down/C-Right will cause a monochrome picture of a blonde woman to appear.
•Holding L and pressing Down on the D-Pad/C-Left/C-Up will cause a color picture of a brunette woman to appear.

In the Nintendo 64 release of the game, there is a list of 2,170 names that when entered to save your high score will cause all menu text to be replaced with a string of gibberish unique to each name. Attempting to complete a Competition after doing this will likely cause the game to crash. The most popular example of this glitch is entering the name "TYR" which causes the menu text to instead display "RXJP Y HMB". The last two characters of names entered (including blank characters) that trigger this glitch act as a checksum of the preceding characters, suggesting that this glitch is a remnant of an early password system that was scrapped in favor of Controller Pak saves.

In the N64 version of Tony Hawk's Pro skater the game has removed blood and censored some gaps, also due to the small memory space of the cartridges there are no videos and the music is either looped or removed.

The game initially started life as a racing game inspired by the arcade game Top Skater.

In Australia, New Zealand and parts of Europe, the game was released as Tony Hawk's Skateboarding, as the word skater implies ice skating in those countries.