Skateboarding video games are back. Pt 1 of ??? - First, some very personal stuff ...
It's not just "THPS" vs. "Skate" anymore, and that's a win for gamers and skaters both. But I've got a lot of rambling to do before I get to the point ...
I wanted to begin this post by saying that “words cannot describe how much Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater means to me”, but if I can’t describe things in words, what the hell am I even doing? So indulge my rambling as I try and actually describe what the franchise means to me … (TW: suicide, depression, anxiety, poverty, American politics)
Growing up, I was certainly not a skater. My brother was a skater, I hung out with skaters, I wanted to be a skater, but to put it bluntly: I was fat, depressed, agoraphobic, and a million other things that basically had me playing video games all day when I was able to. One of those video games eventually became a lifeline for me, a suicidal teenager — Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.
Despite the fact that the Pro Skater games didn’t have much resemblance to actual skating, they did accurately depict skater culture in spirit. They did this with incredible level design — creating a skater’s paradise out of real-world-inspired locations — and empowering you, the player, to absolutely shred those locations with over-the-top gameplay physics.
They also did this with hands-down the best licensed soundtracks in the entire history of the games industry.
I don’t know if you know this, but music is important to virtually every human on the planet in many different ways and capacities. What music is important to specific skaters is broad and spans many genres because the skating community is broad and spans many cultures and backgrounds.
The sport of skateboarding has its problems with gender inequality, racial inequality, and all kinds of inequality that most major sports struggle with. But when I was a kid, all I knew was that skaters were the coolest people because in my circles, everyone was poor and everyone was joined by poverty in my small, broke ass podunk city. Skaters controlled the streets (about 40 minutes away from us was Stockton, where gangs actually controlled the streets, but that 40 minutes was enough to mostly insulate us from that) and when you’re poor, streets are where you spend most of your time.
It was hugely important at the time that the marquee skateboarding video game have an absolutely killer soundtrack. Somebody at Neversoft — developers of the original games — or Activision — publisher of the original games — was smart enough to know this, and the Pro Skater games featured some of the absolute best hip-hop, rap, punk, metal and rock you could find. Songs from those games are iconic songs in skater culture. Some of those songs would be used in landmark skate videos of the time, official and unofficial.
So the Pro Skater games had great gameplay, great level design, great music, a great understanding of skater culture, and a great understanding of what gamers wanted out of action sports video games. It had to be a hit, and it was a hit, for millions of people.
Back to it being a lifeline for me, James Brady. I’ve not been shy about my history with suicidal tendencies, my history with depression, my history with poverty and homelessness, my history with very bad anxiety, or any of that stuff.
When I was a teen, I knew I was going to kill myself one day. It wasn’t performative — I never told anybody about it at the time. It wasn’t for attention. I just knew it was going to happen. Life had no meaning for me outside of my online friends and video games. In my head, it was only a matter of time before those online friends realized I sucked and abandoned me, and eventually, I had to get bored with video games some time, right?
It would be inaccurate to say that Pro Skater saved my life on its own. It was a combination of those online friends, who never did abandon me, my family, music, and many, many, many, many, many, many different video game franchises. But Pro Skater is near the top of that list, because it made me feel like I could do something athletic because at the time, my teenager brain told me that because I was fat, nobody would ever love me (reinforced heavily by bullying, naturally).
..Ah, I feel like this is getting a little “woe is me”. Despite my rambling, I think I’ve made it at least partially clear why Pro Skater means so much to mean personally. It’s an incredible series that offered me an escape from a terrible life.
And since we’re in a global pandemic, America is literally on fire, and President Bunker Bitch is panicking the fuck out because he’s going to lose in November, I need another escape.
One such escape surfaced this month in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 Remastered by Vicarious Visions, a games developer I’m going to talk A LOT more about in relation to Pro Skater in the future (they ported the Pro Skater games to the Game Boy Advance back in the day, and if you’ve never played those versions, they were incredible!).
I’ve shared some thoughts about the game on Twitter, but suffice to say I am totally and completely in love with this remastered release. I think they nailed it, and whenever I’m feeling down, or bleak, or absolutely devastated, it’s Remastered that I load up for a quick 2-minute session that quickly turns into an all-nighter.
I think that’s all I have in me to write today on this … so let me tell you what’s to come in this series of newsletter posts about the state of skateboarding video games, the video games industry’s views on skateboarding video games, and skateboarding in general.
The next post you see in your inbox for this series, which I’m calling Skateboarding video games are back. Let's make sure they stay back! will clean up some of the rambling I just did, talk more about Remastered, talk about what the Skate franchise is, and then briefly visit the current skateboarding video games landscape, which includes games like Skater XL, Session, Skatebird, and a few others you might now know about (hello THUG Pro, i see u).
Stay tuned and stay safe, friends. <3