Maybe you had to be there to fully appreciate it.
Or perhaps you somehow missed it even if you lived through it.
Regardless, I am here to tell you: “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater” was a whole mood.
There was a time when this game repped a significant piece of our world’s culture.
I don’t believe I’m overstating things when I say this. The skating scene was blowing up, this game was blowing up, and it all became the sort of thing that, while it was certainly juvenile and maybe a little bit silly, it was also the sort of thing that a LOT of people got into.
So, let’s set the stage a little for the younger folk (and the people who like to reminisce).
Way back in the fall of 1993, ESPN, not content to keep swimming through the bags of money they were already making through cable rights deals, made the somewhat illogical decision to launch a second network, because, well, who hates money, amirite?
They went with the novel name of “ESPN2” with its on-air personalities regularly referring to it as “The Deuce.”
Cute.
Now, backing up a smidge, I say the venture was “somewhat illogical” because only the tiniest of details – a giant, gaping lack of programming – was a potential stumbling block.
Oops!
Well, this lack of programming foresight encouraged the folks at ESPN to get creative about what they’d put on, which led to the creation of the X Games … as well as many, many jokes about scraping the bottom of the barrel for something, anything to put on the air. ESPN2 sorta became synonymous with airing ridiculous events that were decidedly not sports-related, barely sports-related, or maybe even (in the best case scenario) somewhat sports related.
Anyhow, most of it had a tenuous connection to “traditional” sports (or no connection at all).
The aforementioned X Games was a made-from-scratch Olympics-style competition for offbeat, alternative sports like snowboarding, motocross, BMX, and of course, skateboarding, that made its debut in 1995. And the X Games, despite its nature as a corporate creation with a limited appeal outside of a niche audience, grew in popularity over time.
These events, after all, were more sports-like than something like lumberjacking or billiards.
Eventually, people began to figure out there was money to be made in marketing to a demographic that was interested in watching what was essentially counter-culture entertainment.
“Eff the man! Buy more product!”
It was probably inevitable. I mean, there were sports drinks to peddle. What I recall most about that era, culturally, was that everything back then had to be “cool.” It was a requirement. It’s why video game commercials of the era were ridiculous and looked like this:
So OF COURSE the X Games became a thing.
And one of the biggest players on this brand-new stage was Tony Hawk.
Hawk, a professional skateboarder, was so popular that it’s probably unnecessary for me to have just typed that he is a professional skateboarder. In the same way that people know Michael Jordan is a basketball player, or Mario is a video game character, Tony Hawk came to be the embodiment of his entire sport.
You already know who Tony Hawk is.
But if you weren’t around back then (or very, very young), you might not understand that at least some of the reason the man is synonymous with skateboarding is the existence of “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.”
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater at a glance
Genre: Sports
Released: 1999
Platform: PlayStation
No. 36 on Game Informer’s Top 100 Games of All Time