Tony Hawkathon 01: Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater

Full disclosure: I was too cool to be cool enough to play Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.

Look! I was a teenager! It was a confusing time!

The long short of it is that I was a nerd. The advent of the Playstation was something that happened simultaneously with my becoming a teenager (seriously, a Playstation was my big birthday present when I turned 14), and my first big games for the system were Final Fantasy 7 and Mega Man 8. Because I was a Nintendo kid! I followed the franchises that I loved, and shunned anything new and different. I would try SaGa Frontier because Squaresoft had the genius idea to make it look like a Final Fantasy 8 jewel case, but some game that wasn’t based on a property from the 80’s? And it’s about some dude you could see on television? Miss me with that nonsense.

The paradox of being a teenager is simultaneously seeking approval from your peer group while wanting to be the most unique snowflake that ever drifted down from Heaven. Before the term had coalesced into what we see now, I defined myself as a “gamer”. I played Street Fighter, Super Bomberman, and Rampage with my friends. I did not play some kind of skateboarding game. I did not “give in” to the trends set by MTV. I did not want to be one of the beautiful people jumping around on The Grind every morning, I was the teenager that stayed up to watch Daria on The Ten Spot to commiserate with how nobody gets it, man. You could not sell me Monster Energy Drink to guzzle down at the X Games, I was in my own lane worried about cartridge prices and whether Clock Tower would ever be localized. That’s right, dumb jocks, I know words like “localization”. You skater bois wouldn’t understand.

I thought I was too cool for any of the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games when they were first released. I was staying in my lane, and I imagined anything featuring “extreme” darling Tony Hawk had to be just about as relevant to gaming as Home Improvement: Power Tool Pursuit.

So, imagine my self-loathing when I discovered some years later that the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games are effectively 3-D platformers. Just like so many of my beloved N64 titles! I could have been having fun with these games for years! But I didn’t! Because I thought it wasn’t “for me”!

Bah!

So, as an apparent apology to the one and only Tony Hawk, please enjoy the next ten weeks of fanboymaster taking us for a tour of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater (and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater-alikes).

Let’s Play Tony Hawk’s Games
Night 1
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater
Playstation, 1999

Random Notes:

• We have fanboymaster shredding in the pilot’s seat for this entire marathon. Tonight, he is joined by Chromes, Morning Song, BEAT, Cassandralyn, Ample Vigour, and myself. Pro skater fanboymaster is used to later games in the series, so please forgive him for any clumsiness on display here.
• Tony Hawk will forever live in a pre-9/11 world where we could play with ladders for days.
• “How do we feel about Bruno the Kid?”
• “Blood Puss” is not the name of an anime or vegetable, and I absolutely should not make that a category tag on this very website.
• Chromes provides critiques of Academy Award winning musical Emilia Pérez opposite Tony grinding on Mountain Dew billboards.
• A skate competition reveals that Tony Hawk’s blood is “mostly for show.”
• “You know what’s a game that has got good spectacle? Monster Party for the NES.”
• I am being blamed for people dreaming of impossible rail shooter games, and I feel this is no longer a safe space.
• “Now you will become the new Tony Hawk.” “I’m not ready for that.”
• fanboymaster completes the entirety of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, so we are rewarded with a video of people falling down. Better get used to that…
• And we still find time to talk about Mega Man during the credits. We all have our vices.

Next Week on the Hawkathon: Tony Hawk’s second quest.