The Special Meter 3: Tony Hawk Made Skateboarding So Big that Even 9/11 Couldn't Take It Away
The man and the franchise had done enough for skateboarding to prevent its death alongside other "fads" like rollerblading following a shift in America's national outlook
This is the third installment of this little project called The Special Meter, a series about the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater video game series and how they fit into and influenced culture over the years. If you’re new here, check out the posts about THPS and THPS2. Also:
Editor’s note: For full multisensory immersive THPS3 effect, I recommend listening to “96 Quite Bitter Beings” while reading this article. “The Boy Who Destroyed the World” is also acceptable.
Life changed for everyone in 2001.
After 9/11, almost every single aspect of American life (and life abroad) would never be the same. There are a lot of instances of movies, TV shows and video games being changed at the very last minute before release to edit out a terrorist plotline, an establishing shot of the Twin Towers, or something else that would upset a nation currently united in its collective grief, fear and anger. Uncharacteristically united for maybe the last time.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3, the franchise’s debut on the new generation of consoles of the time, had an airport level. When the game came out in late October of 2001, you were tasked with thwarting pickpockets victimizing travelers mulling around the terminal by skating into them before time ran out. But, just a little over a month before the release, the challenge was to stop terrorists from bombing a plane.
So, that had to change.
Throughout its history, skateboarding was an outsider’s activity. It always had that kinship with punk rock. The misfits at school who banded together and didn’t much care for what mainstream society expected. But things changed after 9/11. For one, the kids who were used to outrunning the pigs were now buying skateboards dedicated to the NYPD.
And a game that had a hidden character named “Officer Dick” was now partially responsible for bringing skateboarding to mainstream status - so much so that it was cemented as part of our very cultural identity, and even an unprecedented tragedy that changed the way we as a nation saw ourselves and daily life couldn’t change that.
By the time Tony Hawk 3 dropped, skateboarding was massively popular, influential and lucrative, due in no small part to the success of the first two Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games and the growth of ESPN’s X-Games (due in no small part to Tony Hawk’s real-life 900). And, while it seems silly in 2024 to even compare the two, that cultural cache gave skateboarding staying power following 9/11 that its inline competitors seemingly did not have.
While doing my homework for this series, I found an article from a writer named P.E. Moskovitz, a lifelong New Yorker who remembers rollerblading around the city before 9/11, and argues that pretty much as soon as the towers fell, it was over for rollerblading as a hobby and reasonably ubiquitous subculture in America.
In 1990, the first year the National Sporting Goods Association started tracking rollerblade sales (technically “inline skate” sales, Rollerblade is a trademark of the Technica Group), $53.2 million worth of skates were sold in America. By 1995, rollerblading’s peak year, sales reached an astounding $459.8 million.
Then began rollerblading’s decline. In the year 2000 $276.6 million worth of rollerblades were sold. That’s about a $34.5 million drop each year from 1996. The year 2001 saw a similarly modest drop in sales of $24.8 million, bringing total sales to $251.3 million.
Then, something — i.e. 9/11 — happened. In 2002, rollerblade sales were $160.7 million, a whopping drop of $90 million from the year prior. Rollerblade sales were declining for years, but the average decline was about 10 percent from 1995 to 2001. In 2002 (a year starting just two-and-a-half months after 9/11), sales dropped by 35 percent.
His argument can be simplified as this: The terrorist attacks threw a bucket of cold water on American popular culture and forced us all to “snap out of it,” grow up and quit fooling around with silly things that didn’t matter, like scooting around whimsically on wheeled shoes. This was a serious time, and there was no room for unserious activities like rollerblading. As Moskovitz put it, “America could no longer be the land of the happy-go-lucky fool. We needed to be the land of the wounded, the self-serious, the stoic.” You could not have had something like “Freddy Got Fingered,” which just made it under the wire with an April 2001 release date, in the post-9/11 world. Critics were already too happy to jump on that movie as possibly the worst movie ever made even in what we didn’t realize were the halcyon days. Imagine if Tom Green had done that to a horse in October.
There was still time for entertainment, though. In fact, the idea at the time was that we really needed the distractions. But the distractions came from what were seen as necessary or worthwhile cultural assets. Movies, music, traditional sports, and, surprisingly, skateboarding and skateboarding video games. Things were under a microscope, for sure. Take, for example, Roger Ebert giving “Zoolander,” which came out only weeks after the attack, one star, partly because he saw the assassination plot point to be in bad taste; or the fact that “Donnie Darko” tanked at the box office because of the plane crash plot point (and also because it’s just not that great of a movie, sorry everyone I went to high school/college with.)
But Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3, complete with its slightly tweaked airport levle sold 2.1 million copies and brought in $77 million in the US between its release and 2006.
And during inline skating’s supposed decline, skateboarding continued to grow. Here’s a blurb from a 2004 Transworld Skateboarding article on skateboarding’s overall financial health in the early 2000s:
Large-scale safety gear and skateboard manufacturer Variflex, Inc. (NASDAQ:VFLX) reported its results for the fourth quarter year end in July 2002 with a net profit of 1,164,000 dollars, or 25 cents per diluted share on revenues of over 16.27-million dollars, compared to a net income of 53,000 dollars or one cent per diluted share on revenues of over 12.8-million dollars for the same three-month period in 2001. In October, 2002 Variflex's Chairman Mark S. Siegel stated in a company press release, "We are encouraged by the financial result in the third and fourth quarters, in which we returned to profitability by increasing revenues and gross margins.
Business, as they say, was booming, and skateboarding had fully grown out of its underground subculture status. It was now fully part of the mainstream, and therefore worthy of our attention during a time of fear and grief and forced patriotism. And for Tony Hawk, a guy who had been ride-or-die for every iteration of skateboarding through the neon ‘80s and downturn of the ‘90s, was now ultimately responsible for making it so popular that it was now viewed as something as important as baseball and Spider-Man.
It is entirely possible that, without the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater video game series, skateboarding would have gone the way of rollerblading. A somewhat goofy relic of the past, where you watch a movie with a skateboarding scene and chuckle at the corniness of it all (looking at you, opening scene of “Power Rangers” with the RHCP needle drop). You’d see someone pushing a skateboard down the street and pay extra attention, not because you think it’s cool, but because you’re thinking, “Huh. Interesting. Good for that guy, I guess.”
Rollerblading was left out of the X-Games just a few years after 9/11 in 2005, without any fanfare or anyone really noticing. It was a safe cut to make. The games could continue and even grow without rollerblading, but by this point, if some ESPN suit took a gamble and cut skateboarding there would likely be no X-Games at all.
And, to keep it on the topic of video games, you can look at the game Aggressive Inline, which looked to cash in on the hype of action sports video games, and even moved the needle by introducing the open-world aspect that THPS would use for its next installment, as anecdotal evidence of the fact that rollerblading was beyond saving by this point. Aggressive Inline was, simply put, a great game. And it clearly influenced the others in the genre. But is there an Aggressive Inline 2? No. But there sure as hell is a Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4.
(Quick! If the songs from up top ended by now, click here!)
If the goal of the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater video game series was to make money, they succeeded. If it was to introduce skateboarding to the masses, they succeeded. They succeeded so well on both fronts that, by the time America’s worst fears were realized and the ‘90s veil of security and prosperity was lifted, skateboarding—which was once a niche subculture carved out by people who wanted nothing to do with the “jocks”—as now sharing the same TV network and on the same level of national importance as SportsCenter.
The most generation-defining moment couldn’t kill it. If anything, during the time that Tony Hawk 3 was selling its millions of copies, skateboarding had become so big that kids were quitting because it was seen as “too popular,” at least to college kids in California at the time.
And two decades later, when another life-altering event stopped the world from spinning and defined a new generation of kids, skateboarding boomed yet again.
Thanks to two video games and two-and-a-half spins, skateboarding was as American as anything, for better or worse.
Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is Webbed Wing
Bonus for those who scrolled down. Tony Hawk 3 had a Tokyo level, which, like a lot of Tokyo levels in video games, was sort of futuristic and urbanized skatepark. Here’s a couple of pictures I took at the Miyashita Skatepark when I was in Tokyo last year. Those bowls were steep as hell and that park is tight.
Wow, you really are reading this stuff, huh? As an added bonus, here’s a picture of me getting caught doing research on the impact of the September 11th attacks on Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 and explaining why it was important enough to warrant research. After explaining this, I actually said aloud, “Don’t post that video. I’m going to write about this so don’t spoil it for people.”
The conceit.