Tony Hawk Pro Skater How To Use Special
Melva Simons
When you decide on the pro you want to play as in the game, you get to choose the skateboard you want to use. Each pro had a handful of options, and you unlock them as you go. Like a guy at a party who only knows one person, I stuck with the name I knew: Tony Hawk (though he would not be my preferred character later on). I picked the faceless blob that was supposedly the guy I had just seen on ESPN, and got to customizing my setup.
But a kid playing Tony Hawk could get amped up enough to see his real board sitting there, take it outside, and play the songs in his head while he throws himself off a plastic ramp for hours and hours and hours, imagining his own special moves and picturing himself much higher in the air than he really is.
Then, a few months later, the world shut down and one of the few things I could safely and legally do was go out and do kickflips at the DIY spot a few blocks from my house. Over time, skateboarding had slipped away from me. Part of going to college where I did was that the skate spot on campus was frequently featured in legitimate skate videos, meaning it was full of legitimate skaters, and I got intimidated. When I got there, Ishod Wair and Mark Suciu were around. It was a pretty far cry from the abandoned tennis court-turned DIY park I grew up skating in New Cumberland, PA.
I can play that game with updated graphics, enhanced soundtrack, and strategically-aged characters, and then I can get excited and take my skateboard out, the same skateboard I used in the game, and relive that magic of rolling away from a heelflip that felt especially high off the ground, or a boardslide that felt especially long. Or maybe just ride it around on the street a little.
I\u2019ve had some trouble finding inspiration lately. I\u2019ve mostly just been a little burned out by real work and real life. All good things, but sort of being pulled apart by separate good horses, you know? That said, I wanted a project to keep up with my own self-imposed demand for this site. I had a few half-formed ideas in my Google Doc drafts over the last week, but none of them felt right. They felt forced, or felt like topics that I wasn\u2019t actually interested enough to write about, so it became a slog, which became depressing, which is the opposite of what I wanted this site to be.
So, I thought about what I like. What I find inspiration in. There\u2019s that idea of \u201CWhat\u2019s something you could give a full TED Talk on today with no prep?\u201D For me, the first thing that came to mind was skateboarding, especially skating in the 2000s and, by extension, the Tony Hawk\u2019s Pro Skater series of video games. I, like a lot of people, really found skateboarding through the game, and its cultural impact can\u2019t be overstated. With that in mind, I knew that as I thought about it, there was an opportunity to write about something relating to each game in the series, whether it\u2019s the game itself or even a tiny aspect of it that I could expand on, and I felt like I was finally onto something, like I had more inspiration than time to write, which is the best feeling.
The Tony Hawk series is about skateboarding, yes. Thus, many of these essays etc. will be, too. But it\u2019s also not about skateboarding a lot, too. It\u2019s a cultural phenomenon that spans decades, happening alongside changes in style, trends, music, technology and everything else. The same way the game had something for everyone who had never and will never step on a skateboard, I hope these have the same broad appeal in some way.
When the first Tony Hawk game came out I\u2019m pretty sure I still had a Looney Tunes skateboard with only a tail. The nose was flat. The wheels were giant and orange, and there was no concave to speak of. I don\u2019t remember getting it, but I know my cousin had the same one, so it must\u2019ve been some birthday/Christmas gift we both got.
I rode that skateboard off the walkway leading up to my next door neighbor\u2019s house. It was about an inch and a half off the driveway. But I knew that if I went to the end and pushed down on the tail a little, even for a split second, all four wheels would be in the air. The most cautious, scared kid you can imagine was trying something that could technically be called a \u201Cstunt.\u201D
The reason I\u2019m telling you about this board that I don\u2019t remember receiving is to say that I don\u2019t remember ever saying \u201CI want a skateboard\u201D or seeing skateboarding in videos or video games and saying \u201CI\u2019d like to try that.\u201D I just had one. It materialized one day. And on the day that I decided to play with it, I realized that I had that particular coding in my brain that responded to bringing all four of those wheels off the ground. We all, hopefully, have been lucky enough to have these moments in our life where we try something and immediately it just feels like, \u201COh, yeah. This is it. This is the thing. This was always out there for me to find and now I found it.\u201D
This was 1999. Only months before the game\u2019s release I had seen the replay of the game\u2019s namesake doing the first 900 at the X-Games on SportsCenter on the TV in my parents\u2019 room while my dad ironed his shirt before work. (Editor\u2019s note: Happy birthday, Dad).
I couldn\u2019t comprehend it at the time, but even at 7 with no frame of reference, it seemed, to put it in ways I wouldn\u2019t have at the time, fucking sick. A dude spinning that many times in the waning hours of daylight and riding away from it. All of the other skaters racing down the ramp to celebrate with him. I didn\u2019t know why they were so excited about this trick exactly, but it sure felt exciting. The fact that it was immortalized alongside an ad for Disney\u2019s \u201CTarzan\u201D still makes me laugh, too.
Between that moment and my own recent, similar accomplishments on a board, that pretty much iced it. I asked my parents to let me rent \u201CTony Hawk\u2019s Pro Skater\u201D for N64 the next time we went to Blockbuster.
One of the first decks you\u2019re given with Tony Hawk is a birdhouse deck called Falcon 1. A semi-intimidating cartoon bird skeleton set against a black backdrop. I liked using light blue wheels for it, too.
In real life, I had graduated from the Looney Tunes board to something a little more substantial, too: A Mongoose board from Toys R Us with both a tail and nose. I went through a few of them, beating the hell out of them by jumping off of my front porch and anything else that I could find until the nose and the tail were chipped and nonexistent. They were terrible skateboards, but I\u2019ll always be thankful for them because I happened to have mine in my mom\u2019s trunk after soccer practice at age 9 or so, and a kid on my team told me his mom had his Mongoose board in her car, too. We jumped around on the curbs and sidewalks at the school where we had practice, and he has been my friend ever since. I don\u2019t think either of us have gone more than about 18 hours without having a functioning skateboard in our possession since those first ones.
The first time I got a \u201Creal\u201D skateboard was, of course, a Birdhouse deck like I had seen in the game, because that was obviously what anyone serious about skateboarding would and should have. It wasn\u2019t the Falcon 1 deck, but the griptape was cut to show off the Birdhouse graphic on the top just like the pros had it. I was just like them.
I don\u2019t know a video game that inspired so many people to actually stop playing the video game, turn off the system, go outside, and do the thing you were just simulating doing. Maybe a sports game might get you to go throw a football around. But, for something like Madden, you were either playing it yourself against the computer, and then what? You\u2019re gonna go out and throw the ball to yourself like Milhouse throwing a frisbee in his yard? Or, you\u2019re playing against a friend, and that\u2019s usually good enough. You don\u2019t then go out and play football against each other in the yard. You\u2019re not playing Mario Kart and then throwing banana peels out of a car window. To say nothing of playing Grand Theft Auto.
And suddenly, words like \u201Ckickflip\u201D were no longer part of a foreign language maintained only in a subculture. The kids on the playground knew what a nosegrab was. They were singing songs by Suicide Machines and Suicidal Tendencies. They didn\u2019t know what it was, but they knew it.
Then the fall of 2019, roughly 20 years after Tony Hawk\u2019s 900 (a common measurement of time), my friend Pete came and visited me in Philly. We went out with our friend Marco and drank way too much at a bar called Ortlieb\u2019s in Philly that used to be more affordable and also not surrounded by crappy apartment buildings (another way to mark the passage of time).
I checked Instagram at one point and saw that Birdhouse had re-pressed the Falcon 1 deck. By now, the boards from the original Tony Hawk game were like old baseball players: a fun game to play with your friends where you try to remember the most obscure and beloved ones. This was a board I had always wanted but never had. I showed my friends while they smoked their cigarettes. They convinced me it was a good idea to buy it, so I did. Pete came over a little while later and told me that he hadn\u2019t seen me that excited about anything in a long time, so he ordered me one, too. I now had two of the same deck coming my way. I forgot about it until I got the shipping email a few days later.
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