The Special Meter 5: No Going Back
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 sucked. Plain and simple. It was an attempt to recreate the original magic, but just fell flat. But it wasn't the end.
Welcome to THE SPECIAL METER — a series on the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games and the culture surrounding them. This is the final edition, so if first nine releases, you can check them out here:
The Special Meter 2: ‘Ollie the Magic Bum’ and Skateboarding’s Portrayal Problem
The Special Meter 3: Tony Hawk Made Skateboarding So Big that Even 9/11 Couldn’t Take It Away
The Special Meter 4: Last Shot at the Jocks
The Special Meter Underground: You Don’t Pay to Get In, But You Pay to Get Out
The Special Meter Underground 2: Chair Hops and Sit Flips
The Special Meter American Wasteland: History Repeating
The Special Meter Project 8: The Ridiculousness of It All
The Special Meter Proving Ground: Unrequited Hustle Media (Or ‘Choose Your Character Syndrome’)
The parable of the prodigal son is a cliche metaphor, but I’ll use it anyway: It basically goes that a wealthy father divides his estate for his two sons. One of them goes and fucks up to the point where he’s immediately broke and needs to run back home. In the modern day, this would be a rich kid who moves to LA or New York and posts a lot on social media about it, only for their feed to suddenly go quiet or include a few photos insinuating that they’re back in the hometown they tried to escape.
Anyway, he goes home and apologizes to his dad, blah blah blah, and his dad welcomes him home, and the son basically doesn’t learn any lessons of consequences because that’s what happens to rich kids who want to travel on their parents’ dime.
Where was this going?
In 2015, Tony Hawk was the prodigal son returning, having brought his franchise into the far reaches of LA, KISS concerts, Roswell UFO labs, Jackass-adjacency, and the violent streets of Philadelphia, picking up countless new characters and sort of forgetting about skateboarding along the way. He wanted to go back to the “core” of what his franchise was all about: Skateboarding, just like those first games were about. And when he returned to all of us, the consumer, the father in this scenario, we did not welcome him with open arms. We, the royal we, the critical masses, told everyone to “avoid this game” and to forget about Tony Hawk, who by this point had a video game avatar that looked like every millennial’s reasonably still-hip dad.
It’s hard to go back to how things were before some pivotal moment. Toothpaste doesn’t go back in the tube. Pandora’s box doesn’t close. Rubicons. Et cetera.
Many have tried. You see it in instances like bands taking a few deserved creative liberties with their source material and trying on some new hats, stretching their legs a little beyond the safe zone of their critically acclaimed aesthetic and sound, but then they want to go back to the way things were before. The fans sure as hell want them to go back to the “good old days.”
But, as we all know, you really can’t. You cross into a point where the attempt to go back to how things were is nothing but a cheap approximation at best. It might or look and sound a little like it was, but the magic is gone. It’s an EPCOT version of something great.
Look at Weezer.
For about 10 years now, Weezer has been promising some return to the “good” “Blue Album” and “Pinkerton” days, or at least something like the “Green Album” (which I think is as good as “Blue”/”Pinkerton” but this isn’t the time or place).
They kept coming close, including making songs literally apologizing for doing things like working with rappers and producers and just making watered down pop songs after building a career out of being nerdy, thoughtful, garage-dwelling metalheads. But god damn if Rivers can’t stay away from veering into the pop world and whatever the hell else he wants to do. And guess what, that’s fine. He doesn’t owe anyone anything. And if you want to hear the bands you love sound like they did 20 years ago, you can, because the nostalgia economy is going strong.
Look at all of the festivals popping up where the bands that were big in your formative years are playing those seminal albums in full. It makes a lot of sense that the main festival like this is in Las Vegas where everything is a bizarro version of real places in the world in order to keep you entertained and spending money.
There’s no guessing what songs the bands might play - or worse, dreading having to hear the new material from after their “I liked them before [insert album turning point]” moment.
One time I saw Less Than Jake (of THPS4 and THUG2 soundtrack fame) live, and they had a wheel with all of their album covers on them. They spun the wheel, and whatever album it landed on, they’d play some songs from it. It landed on what was then their latest, In With the Out Crowd, a noted departure into more radio-friendly hits or whatever, and the crowd booed.
The band basically did an “I know, I know, but we’re contractually obligated to the wheel” or whatever, and played through one or two of the album’s most palatable songs with that look on their faces of showing your friend a song or movie you like and they don’t seem that into it.
The point here is that creatives have a few options: Just recreate the same thing that worked once over and over to the point where you go stale, or try new things at the risk of sullying your reputation, but in the hopes of maybe “going back” at some point.
That’s the thing about burning out versus fading away. They say it’s better to burn out, but when you fade away, you have the potential to turn things around. Burning out is 100 to 0. You can right the ship during a fade. You’ll never get back to 100, but you’re still around.
While trying to return to something in the past, Tony Hawk 5 at least did make a real effort to introduce the world to a new batch of young and exciting skateboarders for a new generation. And, while the only female skater most people could name up to this point was Elissa Steamer, THPS5 included the likes of Lizzie Armanto and Leticia Bufoni, in addition to guys like Ishod Wair, Nyjah Huston, Aaron “Jaws” Homoki, and even his own now-pro skater son, Riley Hawk.
So, with at least the effort to progress the franchise to match the current state of skateboarding, why did it fail?
Well, because it was kind of just a nothing game. It was rushed, it was incomplete when it was released, and it offered nothing in the way of any wow factor.
The IGN review at release in 2015 said “Pop shove it right in the garbage” (damn) and “Grinding to a halt” (wow) and “Half-baked pipe” (OK if I were editing this I’d cut this one). The bottom line:
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5’s rare moments of nostalgic joy are drowned out by its abundance of poorly thought out levels, control problems, bugs, and its glaring lack of attitude.
The first two games, while bare bones, were released on a bare-bones technology. You didn’t need many bells and whistles because you didn’t expect them. Now on current-gen consoles, and having just played several movie-quality video games from the franchise, players expected more than just skateboarding.
Even in a nostalgia market, where Weezer was just one year out from “Back to the Shack” and admitting its aging fans weren’t into songs with Timbaland, it was a hard sell.
The franchise looked like it was burning out, and it wasn’t doing it on top.
I think often about these parallel realities where the bulbs that burnt out rather than faded away got to fade away. Often, like a lot of things in my life, I think about this through the lens of music.
Kurt Cobain is obviously a good example here.
Where would we be today if Kurt was still around? Would there be a Foo Fighters? Would Dave Grohl have stuck around in Nirvana? Would he have split off and we’d have a Foo Fighters/Nirvana feud? Would Nirvana still be a thing? Would it be any good if it was? Would the shirts still be sold at J.C. Penney?
The thing about dying young and beautiful and fashionable is that you’re preserved in that. We all like to believe that if Kurt was still around then Nirvana would be making music as good as it was on “Nevermind,” but we know the odds are stacked against that.
To say nothing of what a Kurt Cobain pushing 60 would be like. It’s entirely possible that he’d be a cool dad of the rock world with perfect politics, thoughtful and agreeable opinions on things, providing a guiding light for generations coming up in that world as he tastefully and gracefully steers his own creative endeavors into his later years.
It’s equally likely that Kurt would’ve ended up some loudmouth contrarian like Johnny Rotten at worst or Liam Gallagher at most entertaining. We just don’t know, and we never will.
But things work out. Not saying they work out “as they should” because I don’t think anyone would say that a person should burn out at such a young age. But things work out.
If Kurt remained alive, who knows what the musical landscape would look like. On a personal level, who knows what life would’ve been like for his daughter, who recently got married to aforementioned THPS5 character and real-life son, Riley. Insane, right?
We know what happened next for the franchise. They did go back. They remastered the first two games with a few updates like aging up all of the characters, adding a few new ones, throwing in some new songs to the existing soundtracks (including friends of the newsletter Pkew Pkew Pkew), and everyone was happy. They were happy because, like the festivals built on the idea of playing the old stuff but with the experience of 20-or-so-years, they perfected what was already deemed perfect. There were tweaks, but no risks.
Tony Hawk the franchise could’ve burnt out after THPS5, but instead it faded for a while and came back — just like Tony Hawk the man has faded after skateboarding’s ups and downs in popularity/marketability and his own injuries have kept him sidelined for extended periods of time.
For right now, though, thanks to the business of video game studios, it looks like the franchise might really be truly dead. There were reported plans of remastering THPS3 and THPS4 the way they had done with the first two, but Activision’s business strategies effectively took away the studio that would’ve done that in favor of throwing resources Call of Duty franchise. The military will always beat skateboarding, unfortunately.
And if the franchise is done, then, well, I’d say it ended as close to back on top as possible. It was in the warehouse, school, and desert mountain downhill jam that we loved so much, with the songs we all loved when we were kids, with video game characters who had been through a lot in their own careers and person lives 20 years but were still around. And there were even some new faces in the mix.
I got a new skateboard the other day. It’s still one of the most exciting moments in my life, even this far on. And I thought about the process of “relearning” like I had written about before. I thought about how ashamed I also felt at all of my tricks going away. The things that once came naturally to me now felt foreign. But I thought about my options in front of me: Burn out, and become a “I used to skate” guy, or just accept the fade, and fade back in.
I set my new board up, took it out front and rode it up and down the block to feel it out. Some kids were throwing a ball a few houses down. I heard one yell the phrase that so many on a skateboard have heard yelled at them over the years.
“Do a kickflip!”
I positioned my toe just south of the front bolts on the left, angled at about at 2 o’clock angle. Felt my back foot find the edge of the tail. Popped, flicked, and the board barely spun.
I hopped on it again. Found the footing, popped, flicked, and this time felt the grip tape come back up to meet me and the familiar PACK of the wheels hitting the ground before I rolled away.
The kids cheered. I felt like the king of the block.
And I felt that spark that skateboarding had always given me, where I couldn’t wait until I get to go back outside and feel that again after a few tries, and maybe even learn some new ones.
You can’t go back, but you sure as hell can come back.
Welp. That’s it. That’s curtains on THE SPECIAL METER. I had fun writing it. Most importantly, I felt productive doing it, and it felt good to have a writing prompt every week in some way and explore how I could write about a video game series and everything around it. What’s actually most important is that I hope you enjoyed reading it a little bit.
With that, I hope you subscribe if you haven’t already, because there will be plenty of other stuff on the way as usual. This was just a detour. No more cancer stories though. That shit is DONE. Of all my misguided attempts to write Vice-like stunt journalism, getting advanced-stage cancer to write about it wasn’t my best idea.
Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is The Color Green.
Hey, thanks for scrolling down. Just so you’re aware, I did try to get the birdman back on this. I figured it was a longshot, considering he’s extraordinarily busy. But it was worth a try. If this worked out, it would’ve really been a high mark for this newsletter, and I genuinely might’ve called it quits after that. But, alas, his team politely passed and now you’re stuck with me.
Now it’s my turn to thank you, the reader, for your interest in Tony Hawk the man and franchise, and for reading this weird writing exercise turned months-long project.
Kind regards,
BM Management