Backflip to the future: The lasting legacy of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater

The year is 1999. You unwrap a new game, buzzing with anticipation as you sit inches from your tiny CRT TV. You place the disc in the tray with care and jam the power button. The loading screen flickers out and a smooth looping sample track slides out of the speakers. You check all of the options if that's your thing, and pick a skater.

Then everything changes.

Your ears hear for the first time a combination of sound effects and music that will be seared into your brain: the grind of skateboard wheels turning on concrete fuses with the initial drums, guitar and horns of "Superman" by Goldfinger as you break through plate glass and head down that first fateful ramp. 

"So here I am

Doing everything I can

Holding on to what I am

Pretending I'm a superman ..."

And then your skater flails to the ground for the first of a million times.

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater (THPS) was released 25 years ago on Sept. 29, 1999, and the franchise it spawned became a cultural phenomenon that forever altered not only the video game industry but for the sport of skateboarding itself. The game launched the PlayStation console but was later adapted for Nintendo 64, Game Boy Color, Dreamcast and N-Gage. 

Twenty-five years later, the franchise has more than a dozen games; there is a THPS game for nearly every console since 1999. The latest release is a September 2020 remaster of the first two titles for newer consoles. 2009's Tony Hawk's Ride and 2010's Tony Hawk's Shred brought a motion-sensitive skateboard controller for the Wii.

The impact THPS had on skateboarding

"I feel like THPS is a huge part of why skateboarding is here to stay," Tony Hawk said in the 2020 documentary "Pretending I'm a Superman: The Tony Hawk Video Game Story," which explores the impact the THPS franchise had.

Skateboarding has existed in some form since the 1950s and after an initial boom in the 70s, it receded before reemerging from the underground with a subculture of street skaters attracted to the punk rock ethos and anti-authority attitude. Skating exploded as a mainstream competitive sport in the 1990s with large skating competitions like the World Cup Skateboarding Event in 1994 and the X Games in 1995.

THPS embraced it all by featuring professional skaters and elaborate tricks that highlight the athletic prowess of the sport, blaring an iconic punk, ska and hip-hop soundtrack, and showcasing levels that set in an urban street environment where nonprofessional skateboarders might actually ride. It even had a nod toward a "stick it to the man" attitude: an unlockable police officer character named Officer Dick.

According to Scott Pease, studio development director of Neversoft at the time, the developers working on the original game needed to strike a balance between realism and fun. "We knew that we could get sucked into realism to the point where it would not be fun, but we had folks on the team who were skaters, folks who were not skaters, who were just game players. And so it was just trying to blend all those sensibilities together and come up with something that was really fast and fun and addictive."

When it came to level design, Pease said that the team would "pick a location or a city that had realistic skate spots in it, and we'd find a place for those famous spots inside that level, but then around it, we'd kind of construct the terrain in a way that made it really fun to skate and made sure that you could flow seamlessly."

Max Burnette of VGCartograpy created isometric illustrated maps of all of the courses from the first game. A research software engineer, he works in academia helping researchers realize their ideas by writing custom software, web apps and analysis tools. The job does not allow a lot of artistic impression, but he found a way to use his technical skills to create art. He describes his inspiration on his blog. "From a childhood camped in the Barnes & Noble strategy guide aisle to buying my first game magazine in the 90s for help with Tomb Raider 3, I've always loved the ephemera associated with games - the manuals, the posters, the guides."

Because of the breakout success of THPS, Neversoft began developing a second installment to the series that was released in September 2000. THPS 2 − the best-reviewed PlayStation game of all time − featured new songs and skaters and introduced features like manuals and local multiplayer. The game was featured in an international competitive gaming tournament with a cash prize of $10,000.

The franchise continued its trajectory with THPS 3, which launched in October 2001 and became not only the best-reviewed PlayStation 2 game of all time, but the 8th overall best-reviewed video game on Metacritic. It was a launch title for the Nintendo GameCube, released in November that year, and was the first THPS game to support online play.

The franchise kept expanding with annual releases through 2011, then two more in 2015 and 2020. Over the past 25 years, Tony Hawk became a household name and skateboarding grew into a global sensation. The sport made its Olympic debut at the 2020 Games in Tokyo, and though Hawk didn't compete, he appeared as a commentator and has his own athlete profile on the official Olympics site.

THPS "probably made hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of kids start skateboarding that may have never touched a skateboard in their life," said professional skateboarder Chad Muska in "Pretending I'm a Superman."

How THPS was created

Before THPS, a few skateboarding video games had been created, like Atari's 720 and Skate or Die! for the Commodore 64. By the late 1990s, Activision was working with Neversoft, a game development studio, on a skateboarding game that could be played on a PlayStation.

Pease told Paste BN that he jumped at the chance to look into a possible skateboarding game. "I grew up playing Skate or Die! and 720 in the arcades. I grew up skateboarding. It was just like, oh, please, yes, let's do this."

After searching through skate magazines like Thrasher and Transworld, the Activision team the got in touch with Hawk in the fall of 1998. Hawk had been on the hunt for a game developer interested in creating a skateboarding game and agreed to work with them after playing a demo that Neversoft developers created within the build of their most recent game, Apocalypse.

After playing a test build featuring Bruce Willis skating through a wasteland with a gun on his back, he was in. Hawk and the developers later got in touch with nine other professional skaters who added their likeness and personal style to the game.

"We wanted to represent the full scope of skateboarding," said Pease, " We wanted vert skaters, we wanted street skaters, we wanted freestyle skaters. We wanted old skaters who were historical. We wanted the newest up-and-coming skaters on there as well. We'd have a limited number of slots, so it was a hard choice to figure out who, but everyone that we approached, was in, and of course, Tony helped with that."

"Everybody was 100% dedicated to the game and to skateboarding, which was cool. Some of the guys that had never skated before, they really got a taste of it," former Neversoft producer Ralph D'Amato told USA Today, "We rented skate parks and every lunch I would go out and buy skate videos and we were watching skate videos. Even though we weren't skaters, we got really accustomed to and close to the whole environment. People who never skated before knew who the top pros were and trick names and all of these things. It was a very, very cool company and the team was amazing. ... Everybody worked their heart out for it"

"You guys know Rodney Mullen?" asked Pease, "An amazing individual, incredibly smart, super innovative, and a lot of his stuff is freestyle, or at least that was where he came from. He would come into the office. He would talk to us about the physics of the freestyle tricks and the flip tricks and where your foot has to be, and how you have to put the pressure at this exact point, and then you twist your body, all this stuff. And then he'd just kick it and we'd just go out into the parking lot and he'd just do all the stuff for us, and we just filmed it, and we could just get all our reference right then and there. So all the animation in the early games is all hand animated, and we were taking our reference from skate videos, but sometimes skate videos don't have the right angle or it's fisheye or whatever. So being able to just go out there with Rodney and have him do these things and we're just sitting there filming it from all angles, it was incredibly valuable. It was super awesome."

Each of the featured skaters had their own signature move, and Hawk's was originally set as the 540 varial. His move was changed three months before the game was released after he became the first person to ever land the 900 at the X Games in June 1999.

Pease said that the development team jumped into action as soon as they saw it happen. "I remember watching that and being like, holy crap, we got to get that in the game, because we didn't even know that he was going to do that. We didn't know that the 900 was even possible at that point. We had other special tricks in the game for Tony, and then it was like, oh my God, get the animator going, we gotta grab that video. We've got to create this 900, tweak it, get it in the game, and make this last second addition."

"To have him do (the 900), have the game come out, have skateboarding video games all be on this trajectory ... it was this kind of magical moment where all the stars aligned, and this game just blew up," said Pease.

How the THPS soundtrack influenced music

The game's developers were inspired by homemade skate videos in which skaters would record themselves doing tricks edited with their favorite songs. "We had a super-modest budget for the first game, so we had to be scrappy and kind of choose up-and-coming bands or bands that were critical to the history of skateboarding like the Dead Kennedys," Pease said.

The soundtrack from THPS games helped shape the music taste of a generation. The game spreading punk rock, it had a profound influence on the bands who were featured. John Feldmann, frontman for the band Goldfinger who sang the intro track in the first game, recounted in "Pretending I'm a Superman" how the game completely changed the trajectory of his band.

D’Amato never expected the work he and his colleagues did to be so influential when he was hired to work on what was described to him as "this little skateboard game."

"We were five guys that wrangled together all the soundtracks," said D'Amato, "We never thought it was going to be this iconic thing. It just ended up being that way. And it's kind of funny how people always say "Yo, man, I got my music taste from the Tony Hawk video game. I learned about a lot of new bands through that game.""

What's next for the franchise?

Though no official announcements have been made about a new THPS game, Hawk told the Mythical Kitchen podcast earlier this month that he has been talking to Activision recently and "working on something."

In the meantime, go play the game. We recommend tracking down an old console and starting with the original. If you want to learn more about this cultural phenomenon, you can check out the "Pretending I'm A Superman" documentary. It's available on several streaming services, and D'Amato added a discount on the website for Paste BN readers: use the code "Retro" to buy a DVD for ten bucks.

"So here I am

Growing older all the time

Looking older all the time

Feeling younger in my mind..."

Sources: "Pretending I'm A Superman" documentary via D’Amato Productions; Aaron Ryan via Youtube; Max Burnette via VGCartography; Activision; Neversoft;