The Special Meter Underground: You Don't Pay to Get In, But You Pay to Get Out
The Special Meter Underground: You Don't Pay to Get In, But You Pay to Get Out
You miss your ollie and we'll be sending you back to Jersey in a coffee can
Welcome back to THE SPECIAL METER - a series on the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games and the culture surrounding them. I can’t believe I’m still doing this either! Despite what you think, I’ve actually gotten some positive feedback from both friends and strangers, and it’s a nice distraction from real work, where I’m paid to write about things that are not the Tony Hawk games. Speaking of work that I’m paid for: I’m over in Esquire again this week discussing podcasts, which you can read later.
So, yeah, here’s number five of my series THE SPECIAL METER. I’m still having fun with it, and I hope you are, too. If you missed the first four, here they are:
The Special Meter 4: Last Shot at the Jocks
The Special Meter 3: Tony Hawk Made Skateboarding So Big that Even 9/11 Couldn’t Take It Away
The Special Meter 2: 'Ollie the Magic Bum' and Skateboarding's Portrayal Problem
Introducing The Special Meter: A Series on 'Tony Hawk's Pro Skater'
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(Some music choices before we start)
In narrative, the “Hero’s Journey” is defined like this:
The hero is thrust from their normal life and humble beginnings into a world full of magic and wonder, where they achieve victory against man, nature or god, and return home with something to give to their community – the ultimate boon, it’s called.
As video game graphics and capabilities evolved and matured, cinematic storytelling beyond “kill duck” and “save princess” became more common as the games got more sophisticated. Longer cutscenes and legitimate voice actors. Games your friends could watch you play like they would a movie. Hell, games that later became movies and TV shows themselves.
By the time Tony Hawk’s Underground came out in 2003, it was one of the premier franchises in entertainment. It was also now five games in, so the pressure was on to sort of reinvent the franchise to a degree, and keep the wheels rolling. That meant adding a story.
As I laid out in the last piece about Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4, it might have been a bad look to continue playing as increasingly rich guys beating up jocks and messing with the homeless. Also, as the story goes, the developers wanted to avoid the actual pro skater characters committing crimes in the game. It would look bad if you controlled real-life guys with families committing crimes. Bad for their continually blossoming endorsements. (No skateboarder has ever committed a crime, after all.) But, understandably, the focus (and criminal blame) instead had to be on you.
Or, at least, something representative of you.
The hero’s journey in skateboard media pretty much boils down to one heavily-used plot: The kid from a nowhere town with parents who don’t understand their love of skateboarding dreams of making it big. They push their other responsibilities to the periphery, focusing on nothing but skateboarding. Eventually, their time comes through some deus ex machina of a decision maker (usually a pro inexplicably in said nothing town) seeing what they can do. That big victory comes in one singular demo, moment, contest, etc., and they return to their hometown in glory. Or they never return to their home town and live in glory somewhere else.
That plot works for the movie Grind, which came out in August of 2003, and it works for Tony Hawk’s Underground, released a few months later.
The hero’s journey in Tony Hawk’s Underground starts as so many hero’s journeys do.
It starts in New Jersey.
New Jersey makes a perfect place for starting a hero’s journey.
Seeing that the hero’s journey requires leaving home and venturing off into the unknown, the fantastic, the unimaginable, the magical, etc., you have to start in a place that’s pretty much the opposite of fantastic and magical. You have to start somewhere extremely imaginable. Extremely well known.
And like Tony Hawk the franchise had to move away from just playing as the pros and racing the clock for random goals, the game had to depict the “everyman” in the “everyplace,” i.e. a not rich person not from California.
To so many kids with ambitions beyond their own zip code, California felt and feels like another planet. It’s where general stardom and sunny weather all the time is. For most of us, all of the goals and dreams in California are as far geographically as they are metaphorically.
So, when you’re crafting a story like this, you have to think “What is the exact opposite of the glamor of California and its increasingly lucrative skateboarding industry?” The answer is usually New Jersey, specifically what looks a lot like Trenton based on the bridge and train station.
Trenton Makes, the World Takes, am I right?
New Jersey has served as a fitting backdrop for stories where the main characters don’t feel fulfilled in life. Disgruntled convenience store workers. Rich kids pretending ennui is an attractive personality trait to attract infantilized female characters and listen to the Shins. Dudes who hate their jobs as investment bankers or gave up on med school in favor of smoking weed and getting lost on the way to get fast food.
It serves as an easy punchline – the undercultured side of the bridges and tunnels.
The Tony Hawk’s Underground Jersey level is a fairly accurate depiction of parts of not just Jersey, but of so many Northeastern towns that people want to escape from. Run down row homes next to industrial sites that no doubt closed decades ago, leaving a large percentage of the town unemployed and possibly now addicted to something (as evidenced by the fact that the villains in the first THUG level are “drug dealers who hate skateboarders”).
The level opens with the main character saying, “Home sweet home. What a dump.”
It is a dump, because it has to be a dump to underscore the importance of leaving. Where’s the motivation to escape paradise?
I also grew up with dreams of becoming a pro skateboarder. With my own city’s nuclear cooling towers just miles down the river, I carefully chose what company my character would ultimately go pro for – each team with its own particular aesthetic that I had to match with my own perceived pro skateboarding personality.
Tony Hawk’s Underground and, hell, even Grind, resonated with me in suburbia, daydreaming that someone important would watch us do a trick in our driveway. Kids like me dreamed of being in that right place at the right time, where we could pop an especially clean kickflip in front of Chad Muska, who happened to be in town for a demo, he hands you his board, and you lie and say you actually think Muskabeatz is sick, you get in with the right people, and suddenly you’re in all of the magazines you cut out and taped to your wall.
I didn’t grow up in Jersey, but I saw myself in this level.
The worst fate for the main character of Tony Hawk’s Underground is that he is within touching distance of everything he ever wanted, and is rightfully about to get it, until it’s taken from him through an act of betrayal (in a college essay, this would be an example of man-versus-man conflict). With nothing else, he is forced to return to the fate worse than just missing out on his dream: He misses out on his dream and has to go back New Jersey, tail between legs.
Because by now we’re all trained to believe that New Jersey is the worst place you can go.
But you don’t hate New Jersey. You hate yourself, friend.
New Jersey works as a stand-in for unremarkable suburban life, which makes us uncomfortable when we can see a bit of ourselves and our town in it, because that means our own towns and lives are unremarkable, too.
We yearn to escape, but most of us don’t. So we watch movies and play video games where the hero does make it out to places like New York, Hawaii, San Diego, Russia, Australia and (a dream for skateboarders and Hold Steady fans alone) Tampa.
Is it an unfair depiction to paint Jersey as a whole state as just one neighborhood full of stinking dumpsters and urban decay? Yeah, totally. But is it also fun to make fun of it from across the Delaware River? Yeah, sure. But it’s also important to remember that you’re not so hot of shit just because of where you are. You and where you live isn’t that different, and that’s why the Jersey backdrop as a setting for mediocrity works so well.
It’s the liminal space between reality and dreams, success and mediocrity, heroism and defeat, where you have to pay a bridge toll to escape.
It’s OK not to make it out. Even Springsteen sang so much about leaving but still stuck around.
And for a franchise that was starting its own new journey, too, Jersey is an apt place to start and, ultimately, finish. The ultimate boon for the franchise is creating another example of the story sold to the youth of America – that they can escape their disappointing circumstances if they follow their dreams hard enough.
Or, you know, if a pro skater randomly pops up in there neighborhood. That works, too. But that usually only happens in California.
Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is Wunderhorse
Thanks for scrolling down. Here’s your fun bit of THUG trivia. A lot of video game voice actors tend to stick with that particular medium. Sometimes you get screen actors getting video game gigs, but it seems like a lot of folks just carve out that space for themselves in the video game world. There’s a noteworthy exception in Tony Hawk’s Underground, though. Eric Sparrow, the friend-turned villain of the game that everyone wanted to punch in the face (and you actually do, depending on how many times you’ve played the game), the guy with the insufferable New York-ish nasal, is voiced by Benjamin Diskin. Does the name ring a bell? No? How about the face?
Still nothing?
Well, what if we went back to the early ‘90s and allow him to give us a little anatomy lesson.
Holy shit!