Aggressive Inline: Forgotten Game, Forgotten Soundtrack

A glaring omission in video game soundtrack coverage

With the remaster of the first two Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games about a month out and the revamped soundtrack unveiled over at Noisey the other day, the internet has been all aflutter about Tony Hawk soundtracks and, by extension, other video games with great soundtracks. I’ve been keeping an eye on the coverage (knowing that no one can step to me when it comes to ranking the Tony Hawk soundtracks) and I’ve noticed a few things.

• One: I’m glad that the NCAA 06 soundtrack is getting its due on the internet because it really is great and that’s where I heard “Hyper Enough” by Superchunk for the first time, among other great songs.

• Two: There’s been one game that has been conspicuously absent from these lists. Aggressive Inline.

I get it. Cool publications probably want to keep their name separate from something like rollerblading. Online publishing is already so precarious right now. Writing about something like rollerblading or Hoobastank could destroy all coolness credibility and tank the site completely.

Luckily this is not a cool publication, so we’re divin’ in baby. Let’s roll.

Aggressive Inline came out in 2002, and the soundtrack reflects that heavily. We were still in a place where ska was morally acceptable on a large scale. Everyone was convinced Nu Metal was the future. Emo was riding a third wave. It was a time where X-Games were the be-all end-all of cool and everything had to be “extreme.”

Most importantly, it was a time where you heard “Youth of a Nation” while playing a rollerblading game and didn’t think anything was weird about that

Here’s the full soundtrack:

• Black Sheep - “The Choice Is Yours”

• Boy Hits Car - “I’m a Cloud”

• Eric B. & Rakim - “Don’t Sweat the Technique”

• Hoobastank - “Crawling In The Dark”

• P.O.D. - “Youth of a Nation”

• Reel Big Fish - “Sell Out”

• Saliva - “Your Disease”

• Student Rick - “Falling For You”

• Student Rick - “Monday Morning”

• Sublime - “Wrong Way”

• The Ataris - “Song 13”

• The Pharcyde - “Passin’ Me By”

• The Vandals - “Idea for a Movie”

(I wonder what the Student Rick guys did to get two songs on there. Also I still regularly listen to “Falling For You” cause it is a jam and has one of my favorite cliche 00s pop punk videos.)

Ask anyone who’s ever played a Tony Hawk game about the soundtracks, and they’ll tell you how they learned about artists like Dead Kennedys, Goldfinger, Bouncing Souls, Del the Funkee Homosapien, etc. And I’m one of them. I owe a huge debt to those games for not only getting me interested in skateboarding but also a lot of the music that has been present throughout my life.

But that doesn’t justify the erasure of Aggressive Inline and it’s totally solid soundtrack. Coincidentally, both Aggressive Inline and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater use songs from The Vandals’ Hitler Bad, Vandals Good album. And with the newly expanded Tony Hawk soundtrack including “She’s Famous Now” by Reel Big Fish, I have to be the guy to point out that Aggressive Inline did the Reel-Big-Fish-In-Action-Sports-Game thing first.

They also did the open world action sports game first—something that was actually reflected in reviews for Tony Hawk 4 at the time. It was developed by the same people who did the Dave Mirra games, which were pretty good and had passable soundtracks, too!

And look. I’ve already spent a lot of digital ink defending Hoobastank’s “Crawling in the Dark” (which I discovered from this game). I’m not going to spend more time defending rollerblading (even though there are no doubt a lot of pictures of me as a child rippin’ around the driveway and local skatepark getting rad). But I’ll defend the merit of Aggressive Inline to the death. It was a good game. It had a great soundtrack, and we’d be wise to remember that.

We’re probably not going to remember names like Jaren Grob and Shane Yost and Matt Lindenmuth and Eito Yasutoko forever. Or at all. But we do remember the bands on the soundtrack. If they ever remastered Aggressive Inline, I will buy it. I will play the shit out of it. I’ll happily suggest new songs for the expanded soundtrack like Dan Ozzi did for Tony Hawk.

Hell, I’ll even volunteer to be the guy breakdancing during the title menu.

As always, please consider subscribing to this newsletter so I can justify writing about rollerblading video games with ska-heavy soundtracks.

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Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is Eric Slick (feat. Natalie Prass).