Introducing The Special Meter: A Series on 'Tony Hawk's Pro Skater'

Introducing a new series where I'll write about the greatest video game series of all time, and everything related to it.

May 10, 2024

I’ve had some trouble finding inspiration lately. I’ve mostly just been a little burned out by real work and real life. All good things, but sort of being pulled apart by separate good horses, you know? That said, I wanted a project to keep up with my own self-imposed demand for this site. I had a few half-formed ideas in my Google Doc drafts over the last week, but none of them felt right. They felt forced, or felt like topics that I wasn’t actually interested enough to write about, so it became a slog, which became depressing, which is the opposite of what I wanted this site to be.

So, I thought about what I like. What I find inspiration in. There’s that idea of “What’s something you could give a full TED Talk on today with no prep?” For me, the first thing that came to mind was skateboarding, especially skating in the 2000s and, by extension, the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series of video games. I, like a lot of people, really found skateboarding through the game, and its cultural impact can’t be overstated. With that in mind, I knew that as I thought about it, there was an opportunity to write about something relating to each game in the series, whether it’s the game itself or even a tiny aspect of it that I could expand on, and I felt like I was finally onto something, like I had more inspiration than time to write, which is the best feeling.

The Tony Hawk series is about skateboarding, yes. Thus, many of these essays etc. will be, too. But it’s also not about skateboarding a lot, too. It’s a cultural phenomenon that spans decades, happening alongside changes in style, trends, music, technology and everything else. The same way the game had something for everyone who had never and will never step on a skateboard, I hope these have the same broad appeal in some way.

So, here’s the first installment of what I’m calling the Special Meter series about Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.

When the first Tony Hawk game came out I’m pretty sure I still had a Looney Tunes skateboard with only a tail. The nose was flat. The wheels were giant and orange, and there was no concave to speak of. I don’t remember getting it, but I know my cousin had the same one, so it must’ve been some birthday/Christmas gift we both got.

I rode that skateboard off the walkway leading up to my next door neighbor’s house. It was about an inch and a half off the driveway. But I knew that if I went to the end and pushed down on the tail a little, even for a split second, all four wheels would be in the air. The most cautious, scared kid you can imagine was trying something that could technically be called a “stunt.”

The reason I’m telling you about this board that I don’t remember receiving is to say that I don’t remember ever saying “I want a skateboard” or seeing skateboarding in videos or video games and saying “I’d like to try that.” I just had one. It materialized one day. And on the day that I decided to play with it, I realized that I had that particular coding in my brain that responded to bringing all four of those wheels off the ground. We all, hopefully, have been lucky enough to have these moments in our life where we try something and immediately it just feels like, “Oh, yeah. This is it. This is the thing. This was always out there for me to find and now I found it.”

This was 1999. Only months before the game’s release I had seen the replay of the game’s namesake doing the first 900 at the X-Games on SportsCenter on the TV in my parents’ room while my dad ironed his shirt before work. (Editor’s note: Happy birthday, Dad).

I couldn’t comprehend it at the time, but even at 7 with no frame of reference, it seemed, to put it in ways I wouldn’t have at the time, fucking sick. A dude spinning that many times in the waning hours of daylight and riding away from it. All of the other skaters racing down the ramp to celebrate with him. I didn’t know why they were so excited about this trick exactly, but it sure felt exciting. The fact that it was immortalized alongside an ad for Disney’s “Tarzan” still makes me laugh, too.

🇵🇸 FREE PALESTINE, DEATH TO ISRAEL 🇵🇸 — Tony Hawk landing the first ever 900 at the 1999 X...

Between that moment and my own recent, similar accomplishments on a board, that pretty much iced it. I asked my parents to let me rent “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater” for N64 the next time we went to Blockbuster.

The cartridge was blue. Blue! Wild. All of the other games I had played had been an uninspiring gray. This was different.

When you decide on the pro you want to play as in the game, you get to choose the skateboard you want to use. Each pro had a handful of options, and you unlock them as you go. Like a guy at a party who only knows one person, I stuck with the name I knew: Tony Hawk (though he would not be my preferred character later on). I picked the faceless blob that was supposedly the guy I had just seen on ESPN, and got to customizing my setup.

One of the first decks you’re given with Tony Hawk is a birdhouse deck called Falcon 1. A semi-intimidating cartoon bird skeleton set against a black backdrop. I liked using light blue wheels for it, too.

In real life, I had graduated from the Looney Tunes board to something a little more substantial, too: A Mongoose board from Toys R Us with both a tail and nose. I went through a few of them, beating the hell out of them by jumping off of my front porch and anything else that I could find until the nose and the tail were chipped and nonexistent. They were terrible skateboards, but I’ll always be thankful for them because I happened to have mine in my mom’s trunk after soccer practice at age 9 or so, and a kid on my team told me his mom had his Mongoose board in her car, too. We jumped around on the curbs and sidewalks at the school where we had practice, and he has been my friend ever since. I don’t think either of us have gone more than about 18 hours without having a functioning skateboard in our possession since those first ones.

The first time I got a “real” skateboard was, of course, a Birdhouse deck like I had seen in the game, because that was obviously what anyone serious about skateboarding would and should have. It wasn’t the Falcon 1 deck, but the griptape was cut to show off the Birdhouse graphic on the top just like the pros had it. I was just like them.

I don’t know a video game that inspired so many people to actually stop playing the video game, turn off the system, go outside, and do the thing you were just simulating doing. Maybe a sports game might get you to go throw a football around. But, for something like Madden, you were either playing it yourself against the computer, and then what? You’re gonna go out and throw the ball to yourself like Milhouse throwing a frisbee in his yard? Or, you’re playing against a friend, and that’s usually good enough. You don’t then go out and play football against each other in the yard. You’re not playing Mario Kart and then throwing banana peels out of a car window. To say nothing of playing Grand Theft Auto.

But a kid playing Tony Hawk could get amped up enough to see his real board sitting there, take it outside, and play the songs in his head while he throws himself off a plastic ramp for hours and hours and hours, imagining his own special moves and picturing himself much higher in the air than he really is.

And suddenly, words like “kickflip” were no longer part of a foreign language maintained only in a subculture. The kids on the playground knew what a nosegrab was. They were singing songs by Suicide Machines and Suicidal Tendencies. They didn’t know what it was, but they knew it.

Then the fall of 2019, roughly 20 years after Tony Hawk’s 900 (a common measurement of time), my friend Pete came and visited me in Philly. We went out with our friend Marco and drank way too much at a bar called Ortlieb’s in Philly that used to be more affordable and also not surrounded by crappy apartment buildings (another way to mark the passage of time).

I checked Instagram at one point and saw that Birdhouse had re-pressed the Falcon 1 deck. By now, the boards from the original Tony Hawk game were like old baseball players: a fun game to play with your friends where you try to remember the most obscure and beloved ones. This was a board I had always wanted but never had. I showed my friends while they smoked their cigarettes. They convinced me it was a good idea to buy it, so I did. Pete came over a little while later and told me that he hadn’t seen me that excited about anything in a long time, so he ordered me one, too. I now had two of the same deck coming my way. I forgot about it until I got the shipping email a few days later.

Then, a few months later, the world shut down and one of the few things I could safely and legally do was go out and do kickflips at the DIY spot a few blocks from my house. Over time, skateboarding had slipped away from me. Part of going to college where I did was that the skate spot on campus was frequently featured in legitimate skate videos, meaning it was full of legitimate skaters, and I got intimidated. When I got there, Ishod Wair and Mark Suciu were around. It was a pretty far cry from the abandoned tennis court-turned DIY park I grew up skating in New Cumberland, PA.

(Editor’s note: My friend Hunter edited this video!)

But I still had the kickflip. It wasn’t as clean. It wasn’t as high. It wasn’t as fast. But I had it, and I’d never lose it. Not if I could help it.

The thing about making plans for your future, though, is that the universe doesn’t care and laughs in your face and pulls your pants down publicly in front of the whole school.

That’s one way to say that pretty much right as the pandemic was letting up, I got diagnosed with colon cancer and, obviously, had to do all of the unpleasant treatment for that and, obviously, that made skateboarding harder than it already was.

At one point, once I was on the mend, I decided that it was time to mount my trucks on the Falcon 1 deck waiting in my basement for the “right time.” Re-learning to skate almost from scratch seemed like the right time.

And guess what? I fucking sucked at skateboarding. It killed me. It ruined every day that I tried it. The difference between sucking at it as a kid and sucking at it now was that I knew how to not suck at skateboarding, and yet here I was. I had amassed all the knowledge of how to be a pretty decent skateboarder, but the hardware wouldn’t agree with the software. There was a communication breakdown between brain and legs. I knew a 360 flip beyond just left-down square-square. I knew you pop and simultaneously scoop your back foot to really get the motion of it while you flick your front foot straight out and off the side to get the flip. Wait til you see the grip tape and stomp it down.

I couldn’t do any of that anymore and it was embarrassing and frustrating and no fun because I let it be. I’d give up and go home.

So I let the board keep getting dusty and the wheels turn yellow, and I’d feel a new sense of shame every time I saw it. I knew the kickflip and everything else was slipping even further away again, and I wasn’t even doing the basic upkeep to maintain the bare minimum out of fear.

Being humbled fucking sucks. I hate it! No one wants to get humbled. You want to be cocky forever and good at everything immediately. And skateboarding was humbling rather than fun. I was also sick of my fingers being all torn up from griptape. I don’t remember that happening before, but maybe I was just less of a diva back then. I definitely was.

I realized eventually I had two options: Keep this board in my basement, see it when I go down to check on the mouse traps or get a screwdriver and let it taunt me, and become the dreaded guy who says he “used to skate” and maybe surprises someone at a party by being able to pop an unreliable ollie over a beer can.

Or, I could approach it the same way I did all those years ago, thanks to a blue video game cartridge and the coincidence of another kid having the same shitty board in his mom’s car, too.

He and I talked recently about the re-learning process, and we came to the conclusion that learning to skateboard was one of, if not the single, greatest joy in my lifetime, and I am in a unique place where I get to do it again if I look at it that way. Sure, it’s different now because I’m not “unlocking” tricks the way I had before. They’re in the vault, I just have to dust them off. And yes, my ankles are not as forgiving as they were before, but they’re not going to get any better either.

Plus, I’m the same age Tony Hawk was when the first game came out, so I don’t really have any excuse, do I?

I’m not one to buy in on things like destiny or simulation theory or all of that, but it does strike me as funny that here in this timeline where I’m forced to re-learn how to skateboard, I have the first real skateboard I had pretty much ever seen on a TV screen at my disposal, albeit an updated version. And if I turn on my TV and my modern video game console, I can play the same video game I played back then, albeit an updated version. A lot changes, and a lot doesn’t.

I can play that game with updated graphics, enhanced soundtrack, and strategically-aged characters, and then I can get excited and take my skateboard out, the same skateboard I used in the game, and relive that magic of rolling away from a heelflip that felt especially high off the ground, or a boardslide that felt especially long. Or maybe just ride it around on the street a little.

It seems too perfect to at least not try it.

And if you liked this one, why not tell a friend or two?

Finally, got a memory about the first Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater game in some way? Let me know about it in the comments:

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