The Special Meter Project 8: The Ridiculousness Of It All
The Special Meter Project 8: The Ridiculousness Of It All
For the first time, the THPS franchise had real competition, and a theory as to why Rob Dyrdek is on tv for 12 hours a day.
Welcome to THE SPECIAL METER — a series on the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games and the culture surrounding them.
If you missed the first six 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
As always, if this is your first time reading, go ahead and subscribe. I’ll be done with this series soon, so you can rest assured that you won’t just have to read about Tony Hawk video games for much longer. Most importantly, this is a free blog. I can’t justify charging you American or any other currency for this.
As always, some music for your reading experience.
Everyone has their memories of daytime TV when they were home sick. You play through the nasal congestion to blurt out guesses at “The Price is Right” from the couch. You take breaks between puking to see if so-and-so is, in fact, the father on “Maury.” Daytime TV is infamously terrible.
A couple of years ago, I spent about a week in the hospital, and my recreation time was limited to either walking laps around the hallway or watching TV.
By day two, I could tell you what TV show was on at what time. Not because I have some ability to remember broadcast schedules, but because traditional cable TV has been so beaten down by the streaming services that the already weak daytime hours have been reduced to hours-long blocks of about four different TV shows. Comedy Central is basically just “The Office” Central. Paramount is basically the Bar Rescue channel. One time in college my roommate and I watched six hours of “Bar Rescue” and then when we had to actually leave to go out into the world we recorded two more hours for when we got back.
And MTV is the “Ridiculousness” channel.
If you don’t know “Ridiculousness,” that’s good. It’s essentially MTV’s answer to “Tosh.0,” which was Comedy Central’s answer to “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” It’s irritating, it’s loud, and it’s hosted by a guy named Rob Dyrdek, who was by this point very famous for his other MTV show, “Rob & Big,” as well as other entrepreneurial endeavors.
He was also a pro skateboarder, but that was incidental to a lot of his audience.
Everyone paying attention to any pop culture in the early 2000s knew Rob Dyrdek. He was incredibly famous and, more importantly, incredibly visible on TV. As of the second I’m typing this, at 7:53 AM on a weekday, “Ridiculousness” is on MTV. It’s on until 10, where they take a break to show us “Catfish” and “Teen Mom” for a little while, but it’ll be back on from 10 PM to 10 AM.
Dyrdek, a guy who was very famous for a little while but isn’t thought about in most households anymore, is on TV for literally half of the solar day on what was once a very popular TV station. He has produced enough content for the network to do that. There are more than 1,000 episodes of “Ridiculousness,” meaning that this could go on for days without having to repeat an episode.
I have this working theory that if Tony Hawk had included Rob Dyrdek in his games, we might never have gotten “Rob & Big” or “Ridiculousness,” and thus MTV would look wildly different than it does today. It would still be a block of programming, though. It’d just be different programming. Maybe in this bizarro world Tony Hawk actually got overtaken by Rob Dyrdek in the story arc of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. Where fellow MTV star Bam Margera was sharing the spotlight, Dyrdek might’ve launched a full coup.
Or maybe he’d just be content with his “life-changing money” that would come with being in the game, and the checks from all of his board sales and stuff from kids who like playing as him in the game. Maybe he’d never have the taste for financial dominance that he clearly has, now in his venture capital finance influencer era.
I doubt it, though. He doesn’t seem like that guy. My other working theory is that maybe all of this hustle and grindset might come from the fact that he had such a parallel life to guys like Tony Hawk but never had the one thing that he had:
A video game with his name on it.
And he’s been putting his name on every single other thing he can to make up for that fact.
Dyrdek’s grip on MTV, which was once a brand that carried a lot of weight in entertainment, can’t be overstated. He worked out deals at that network that made him incredibly wealthy and - more importantly for him it seems - incredibly visible.
Looking back on his career, that fame and attention seemed like the end goal from the start. Dyrdek was, in a lot of ways, similar to Tony Hawk, but their paths diverged or, rather, started in different places. The subtle differences in their trajectories and motivations and follow-throughs got them to where they both were in 2007 and the present day, where Dyrdek can yell through the TV screen at poor chumps like me laid up in the hospital bed.
A little less than a year after 2006’s Tony Hawk’s Project 8, EA released a skateboarding video game that was finally up to a level to compete with Tony Hawk’s monopoly over skateboarding video games. It was called simply skate. The period added just that little bit of emphasis that this was about skateboarding and skateboarding alone. The lowercase stylization took away any grandeur it might have had. The game’s cover didn’t even have a recognizable face on it, just a plain white skateboard wheel.
Now developing games for next-gen consoles with better graphics, better memory, better controllers, the gameplay was revolutionary. You used the joysticks to recreate the motion of each trick. For example, a kickflip required snapping the stick forward and slightly to the left, the same way your front foot would. A 360 flip required a “scoop” from right to left and then a flick up.
It represented skateboarding better than left-down-square could, and the aesthetics of it all worked to represent the community of skateboarding, too. The camera angle was literally a camera angle, as if the disembodied filmer (voiced by real-life filmer Giovanni Reda to add another layer of core realism) was really behind you cradling his VX-1000 camera to make your pop look even higher. The songs were ripped right from the videos of the time, and the skaters in the game were (mostly) guys that Tony Hawk hadn’t touched and therefore had a bit more scene cred — guys like Jerry Hsu, Jason Dill, Dennis Busenitz and Chris Cole.
And, of course, Rob Dyrdek.
Rob Dyrdek’s initial path isn’t too different from Tony Hawk’s. They were only born a few years apart, Hawk in Southern California and Dyrdek in Kettering, Ohio. If someone like Malcolm Gladwell were tracing the two guys’ lives, he’d probably point to the fact that Hawk was born in what would become the epicenter of skateboarding as part of his rise. He didn’t have to relocate to find success. The people and the weather were already there. Meanwhile, Kettering, Ohio, was not on any skateboarding map. Dyrdek, like Hawk, got some sponsors and turned pro as a teenager, but decided to relocate to Southern California himself to really chase the dream. The “dream,” here, in retrospect, was obviously more than just skateboarding, since they already had that in Ohio. The dream was everything else California has to offer people with dreams and ambition.
Dyrdek is sort of the anti-Tony Hawk in some ways. His inverse. His Wario. Their paths and pursuits overlap plenty, but their personalities differ a bit. Hawk’s sort of mild-mannered “I’m just happy to be here and can’t believe how lucky I am” persona contrasts Dyrdek’s camera-ready grindset mentality. There was no luck to get there. There was only hard-nosed determination, vision, grindset, wheeling and dealing. He had the flashy jewelry and tricked out cars. He’s sort of Chad Muska with follow-through.
While Tony Hawk the man had plenty of rivals and competitors in his career leading up to this point, Tony Hawk the franchise was unrivaled. Others tried, but they never quite got that combination of gameplay, real-life pro skater recognition, and the je ne sais quoi of skateboarding culture. And, while Tony Hawk the franchise had veered into the very cinematic and over-the-top with its recent games in order to stay relevant and fresh, a game that, down to its very name, was just about skateboarding and went back to basics was suddenly pretty damn appealing to skateboarders and those who liked to pretend to be one on the TV.
Project 8 isn’t a bad game. It’s just that skate. was a better game. THP8 even had a system where you used the joysticks to control your feet, but it was sort of gimmicky, whereas skate.’s whole thing was a lack of gimmick. It has a timelessness about it, too, even if you go back and play and sort of giggle at the out-of-fashion clothing choices your player gets from skateboarding’s 2000s hip-hop era. It was hard, too. You had to actually put some effort and, actually, practice some tricks to get the flick down correctly. That sort of thing appealed to skateboarders.
Skate. was, for the first time, something that could compete with the Tony Hawk franchise. And while it wasn’t Dyrdek’s game in name, he made sure his brand was prevalent. He was in the commercials. He had lengthy cutscenes in the game that tied in with his TV show (and scenes in his TV show that tied in with the game). Everything Dyrdek touched was a commercial for one of his other ventures, which took away from that “core” vibe the game was trying to chase with the rest of its roster.
And it also makes Tony Hawk’s Bagel Bites commercials look quaint in comparison.
I just watched “Late Night with the Devil,” and now can’t stop drawing comparisons to where Dyrdek is - “stuck” on TV for these 12-hour stints, as if his actual soul is stuck in the TV or the broadcast limbo after inking some pact with an other-worldly being to achieve all of his dreams.
Yes, he’s on TV and he’s fabulously wealthy, but does that part of his soul that is trapped on MTV’s nighttime/morning roster continue to suffer, living a separate life from the part of his soul shilling out financial advice on Instagram or the part spending time with his family? Is there a part that still skateboards?
He has all the wealth and fame he could ever want, but it required giving out parts of himself like the horcruxes in that transphobic book series. If there’s a such thing as “selling out,” this might be it.
And, after all of this, he still doesn’t even have a video game. Pity.
Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is MJ Lenderman.