The first time I played Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater was in the late ’90s, and I didn’t know at the time that I was about to revolutionize sports games. At the time, the most popular games were simulations—trying to get as close as possible to either a sports broadcast or the weird Xs and Os that coaches draw. However, versions that got the rights to use real athletes’ names and signboards of real sports franchises were incredibly popular. And something else—skateboarding never really got the world of video games in a state where it looked good and was fun to play. In Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, you could do things like ride a half-pipe, and if you were really good, you could do an unbelievable combination of tricks and button combinations that turned gaming into more of a spectacle.
The truly extraordinary feature of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater is that it doesn’t seem like most sports games. It doesn’t have the typical appearance of an office gift left over from the 1998 holiday season. At the International Sports Bar & Grill of interactive shows, it stands on its own considerable merits as a stellar title. Its unique setup offers an unparalleled number of tricks and combinations. Society will never forget the ollie-to-aerial-to-Switch, Stoopid-grind combo that led to a 40X in my account and countless dead hours in my social life. Performing tricks on this collection of medium-sized, cityscape courses felt like being a freestyler. RNG’s favorites mostly won the day, as skateboarder Chris Cole proved in 2006.
I can still recall the initial occasion I played through the Warehouse stage in the original Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. The level had a look and feel that was the right blend of fantasy and realism to make it work as a skateboarding endeavor in a “gritty, industrial” setting. My first impression of that was very good, and over time, this stage has become one of my favorite aspects of what remains a very impressive game to me many years later.
It’s always been kind of odd, even without factoring in my taste for grunge rock, that my favorite single stage in a game that urges you on to perform a wide variety of moves and combinations is the first one in a part of the game where you’re actually supposed to try to avoid doing any such thing.
The game’s environments are so meticulously detailed that I can recognize not just real cities but even particular real-life neighborhoods in them. An attentive player will see, in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2, that they aren’t skating Los Angeles’s Venice but are instead skating the skate park in Venice Beach. And because Neversoft so faithfully recreated in-game both the appearance and the layout of these areas— and so many other iconic skateboarding spots around the world—it’s hard not to achieve a sense of being there. “Neversoft has gone to great lengths, it seems, to get the physics of the game right,” John writes.
The authenticity of this game had a profound impact. For example, the developers enlisted real pro skaters like Tony Hawk, Rodney Mullen, and Chad Muska—to add legitimacy to their game. These skateboarders defined the sport and were, in turn, digitized and put into a console experience that was then shared by millions of people. I was one of those millions of gamers. I played that game for countless hours. I was a chubby preteen who would never be fit enough to do anything remotely athletic outside of a game. So, yes, the “Pro Skater” games were a false idol for us kids who admired the real skaters but didn’t actually have the guts to do it.
One more essential aspect was the wide range of possibilities for individual characters. Gamers in the Tony Hawk series didn’t just play Tony Hawk; they built an avatar that looked and acted like them, and they named it whatever they wanted. In the evolution of modern video games, ―super series– began with creative, individual expression, so they captured the attention of a lot of players. In these games, skateboarding was a possible truth, meaning anyone—the most famous being Tony Hawk—could show how good they were, and do it in style. It’s often said that the 2000s were an era of good video games. Few were as good as these. How likely are they to come back?
The game put a real premium on exploration and creativity. “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater” wasn’t like any other sports video games of its time. It set itself apart by putting the player in a three-dimensional space and letting them really play around with the environment. Moves this Philistine was expert at included three-flip flips, “nailing” (i.e., grinding) a lead pipe ensconcing a couple of floors up, and playing hacky sack with the physics engine at the elevator doors in the foundry. It was a sports game where the player in the space was allowed to be a god, where the game world was a playground of trick possibilities, and the player was an infinitely elastic participant in all the fun. Indeed, one of the few knocks the original “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater” received was that it allowed its player to be a little too powerful.
The groundbreaking “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater” had a trick system that let players combo all kinds of maneuvers. That changed everything; it let us play around in the game’s world and form our own paths. It also gave rise to a phenomenon that still thrives. Countless kids—myself included—heeded the call of the virtual halfpipe and tried to Skate or Die. But its catchy punk soundtrack, syrupy So Cal atmosphere, and extremely satisfying trick system made it feel mainly like a game that was trying to let you have some unadulterated fun.
I clearly remember spending innumerable hours attempting to polish my combinations, going to the very edge of the game’s physics, and then some, to get “good.” The sheer joy of pulling off a lengthy, intricate sequence of eye-popping tricks was boundless. Even just landing any trick felt like a triumph and made Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 feel like more than just the number one extreme sports title. Pulling all of that off on a PS1 is impressive.
The influence of the game on play mechanics was not limited to skateboarding games. It was also felt in a new era of sports games that emerged at the same time, a “generation” of sports video games that prioritized freedom and player creativity. Its influence continues even today, seen in the structure of more recent games of entirely different genres. Yet this game was itself a product of a team of developers and a former professional skateboarder figuring out what they could bring to a digital medium that could be unique and dialed in to skateboarding mechanics.
The “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2” game from Neversoft Studios, which was released in 2000, was a seminal extreme-board-sports game of the time. It had quite a few things going on that other games in the genre had not tried, and most of those things worked—thanks, in part, to the game engine’s powerful and flexible physics system. The sweetest creative gameplay addition to THPS 2, however, was the combo system that allowed players to link tricks into sequences by doing “manuals” while in a transition between one trick and the next.
The game took a fresh approach to progression. Instead of moving the player through a set of constructed levels, it set up a number of goals in each “level” and let players figure out how to achieve them. What was very innovative about this was that the goals weren’t necessarily the kind you’d see in a platform action game. They might involve, for instance, finding a certain number of items of a particular type or achieving a high score. And in many cases, the player could figure out several ways to complete an individual goal, which turned each level into a sort of puzzle, as well as a challenge of player skill.
The game’s triumph owes a lot to the added feature of multiplayer, particularly since this was the first game of its kind to offer that capability. It was a major reason why this game was played incessantly at parties and other gatherings back in the day. In a way, the multiplayer modes, with or without the use of cheat codes, were what gave this game its long legs, basically doubling what one might have gotten out of the single-player campaign. The game was that. much. fun. And then double that fun, that’s what it was. But the game’s fun is something that can still be realized even now.
The most impressive aspect of “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater,” besides its innovative gameplay, is its soundtrack. This, of course, is the memorable experience for everyone who was a fan. The developers created a ska-punk playlist for the game that served the players’ taste for the music genre in a well-to-serve and constructive way. Tony Hawk and the mechanics of the gameplay may move impressively at 120 mph, but his series of games do the job of leaving the player with a musical memory that stays with them even in the punkless moments of their lives.
The first time I heard Goldfinger’s Superman, it was over the Warehouse level’s stereo system. Its high-energy tune perfectly supported the top-action gameplay, yet another reason why “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater” was so immersive. The Warehouse stereo didn’t have to blast that track, though. The original “Pro Skater” soundtrack was full of well-curated tunes that matched the game’s essence. They encompassed every level and moment of the first “Hawk” title, making the music just as memorable (if not more so) than the game itself.
The soundtrack had an impact that reached far beyond the game itself. It affected the musical tastes of a whole generation of video game players.
I was one of them. If it hadn’t been for the songs I first heard while playing the game, I might never have started seeking out the kinds of bands that the game turned me on to, and my life would be poorer for it. The game was a hit, which meant that it also served as a hit-making machine for the groups featured on the game soundtrack, Serious Clouds, in extending that soundtrack’s reach to an audience of my friends and their friends, who grew up, as I did, in the culture that the game created.
The music was really good at making you get into the zone. I don’t think the tracks were just randomly thrown together to make a soundtrack. If you’re a fan of older punk or pop-punk bands, you can bet you’ll hear them in this game. And for those of you who are into ska, the ska bands are in the game too. Also, I don’t see too many game soundtracks pulling off the whole punk, pop-punk, and ska combo. That all works for me because I’m into those kinds of music. So I have to say that this Mt. Crushmore isn’t half bad in terms of pulling its selection of music together.
The video game’s successful soundtrack underscored another point: Games can be a way to find new music. The appearance of a band in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater” was tantamount to a big break. Bands whose tracks were included saw their popularity rise as the series’ young audience turned into instant fans and sought the music out in other venues. They became successful enough that when the next game in the series came out, the programmers could entice major acts to join in.
In addition, the game’s effect on music spread to real events. The soundtrack, which many players had set as the background to their button-mashing, was filled with the kind of thumping, vibrant, and rebellious tracks that were themselves heavily inspired by the world of skateboarding. The result was that, in the wake of the game and its great success, not only did organized “Extreme Sports” events in general take on a new significance but also a number of events featuring the actual bands that appeared in the game took place. Publicity for groups like Goldfinger and Bad Religion had always been a dream scenario for their labels, but the game’s grinding pull on the console jockey’s audience offered just the thing to push them to a higher tier of exposure.
The “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater” game left an enduring mark on the console gaming industry. Though it started out humbly enough, its successes led to a series of sequels, and those sequels led to a number of spin-offs. What’s more, the gaming foundation that the Pro Skater series put together became a kind of wrangling device that ensnared even unforgiving critics into becoming unlikely fans and turning the media tide in its favor.
The game holds a vital position in taking skateboarding to new heights of popularity. At the time the game was released, skateboarding was still very much a niche sport. Skateboarding has always been a bit of an underground activity. It had fans, but they weren’t as broad as the audience that the Tony Hawk Mother Base tends to have. It was “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater,” and nothing else, that changed all of that. Suddenly, everyone was skateboarding, and to anyone who was too timid to try it on their own, there was a virtual way to get into the act.
The game affected other areas of fun diversions as well. The triumph of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater showed the world that a kid from the far edges of a Southern California subdivision could, with great skill and panache, shape a virtual world in his own image and then invite everyone else into that world for a visit. For some, that was inspiration enough to start figuring out what parts of the thrasher experience would translate well to the small screen.
“Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater” had a deep influence on my life. It was not merely a game I played; instead, it served as a moment of a shared cultural life that shaped my interests in profound ways. This game led me to an appreciation of new music during my preteen years; it inspired what were surely millions of ill-advised attempts at skateboarding in my upstate New York driveway; and, favorite grails of mine aside, it engendered an appreciation for and a kind of tenderly held affection for the power of what we now recognize as the traditional combo sports video game.
The enduring legacy of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater is its constant popularity. For many years, the title has remained a beloved and influential one. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater” and “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2″ were recently remastered. The new Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2” garnered widespread, if not universal, acclaim—it currently has a 90 on Metacritic. Of this, Jason D’Aprile states in Game Phenomenon: “Time was, one could assume that only kids and the odd adult or two played video games. Now the audience is as diverse as the types of games themselves.”
The game’s influence is visible not just in Tony Hawk’s continued personal and financial success but also in how his eponymous video game series has reverberated throughout so many parts of our culture. The Tony Hawk character in the video game became a character in our culture, a character that players of all stripes could indulge in being, by way of virtual avatars. As the franchise has built on the successful foundations of its first four games—authenticity, creativity, and freedom—it’s also pulled off the snazzy trick of making a video game character a full-fledged cultural icon. That is, of course, the role of a successful cultural revolutionary.
Those of us reared on Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater have a deep-seated affection for the game. It’s infinitely playable. It has dynamite soundtracks. And it’s one of the closest things we have to a “rebellious” sports game. As wholesome as live variation can be, sports games don’t often allow much less incentivize players to take vaguely “outlaw” parameters the way a real skater can.
To sum up, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater was a revolutionary video game that altered sports gaming forever. It’s hard to quantify just how much the original game (and its subsequent sequels) have had an impact on popular culture. THPS, as a video game, was an excuse for an entire generation (and then some) to stay up past his or her bedtime. As a video game, it was already an experience; with a little coaxing, that experience became fodder for countless urban legends and playground arguments. But mostly, it was cool, goofy fun, and since when have we not liked that in our video games? Even after so much time and so many “cooler” games, the original THPS had still been at the top of several “Best Games of All Time” lists.
