How Tony Hawk video games captured a zeitgeist, defined a milieu and changed skateboarding forever
Most sports have a lineage of influential superstars who drive gradual, granular growth. Some sports have a panel of outsized icons who immediately leap to mind. But a select few sports remain synonymous with one mystical unicorn who mastered the art, transcended the realm, and outstripped the consensus. Skateboarding is one such sport, and its eminent talisman – Tony Hawk – lingers in the mainstream consciousness thanks, mainly, to a viral video game.
Ask a casual sports fan, or any mainstream pop culture polymath, to name a skateboarder, and Tony Hawk will be a ubiquitous – and often instant – response. Those same people will probably picture Hawk in pixelated form, in the blocky PlayStation graphics of yore, rather than in contemporary flesh, and that lends a quirky wrinkle to the heritage of an evocative sport.
In fairness, skateboarding has always been exposed to peaks and troughs in popularity – wild oscillations in uptake and decline tethered to capricious commercial interest, perceived safety concerns, associated liability costs and disparate genres prone to exclusive infighting. However, its history can be cleanly split into pre-Hawk and post-Hawk tranches, with a seminal video game in between.
Pre-Hawk, skateboarding struggled to reach critical mass, its occasional whirrs of ascendancy outdone by recurring self-sabotage. Spawned in 1950s California by surfers lamenting waveless days, skateboarding did not mature into a standalone discipline – with specialist equipment and a distinct culture – until the 1970s. Around 200 skateparks were built in the US between 1976 and 1982, mirroring an uptick in grassroots interest.
Ironically, though, skateboarding found fertile ground elsewhere: in swimming pools, reservoirs and drainage ditches, oddly. The California drought of 1976-77 left such edifices empty, and creative rascals began skating their vertical walls. A throbbing undercurrent morphed into ‘vert skating,’ focused on large vertical ramps that increased speeds and made tricks more elaborate and entertaining. A young Tony Hawk mastered that style, which soon became the dominant strain.
A gangly kid from San Diego, Hawk used scant prize money from rudimentary contests – plus transient sponsorships and occasional exhibitions – to turn professional in 1982, aged 14. He was not immediately adored within the skateboarding community, however, thanks to animosity between vert skaters and their street counterparts, who eschewed formal ramps – and often, crash helmets – for improvised urban landscapes.
Indeed, Hawk was initially admonished by classmates who considered vert skating uncool, but his ability to buy a house as a high school senior changed that narrative. More broadly, détente emerged between the skating genres as exponents realised their mutual outcast struggles. Camaraderie replaced vitriol, and skateboarding melded into an amorphous blob – differences in apparatus and approach overpowered by similarities in music, clothing and nonconformist impulse.
This new form of skateboarding mixed the structured sheen of vert with the raw grime of street. A veneer of illicit criminality – born of municipal trespassing and burnished by recreational drug use – remained, and a renewed focus on daredevil tricks lent skateboarding a dangerous hue. Nevertheless, a tight-knit band of renegades – including Hawk, Randy Mullen, Steve Caballero and Mike McGill – drove the sport to new organised heights.
The enterprising cadre did not have a codified mission statement to take skateboarding mainstream. Rather, they were simply determined to carve from the niche pastime a sustainable living. The climb was tough – in April 1983, one royalty check from skateboards sales earned Hawk 85 cents – but within the underground community that revolutionised skateboarding, the budding stars became well-known.
The proliferation of skate videos, shot from gritty first-person angles and set to edgy soundtracks, stoked that popularity amid the VHS boom. Gradually, a path to commercial viability presented itself, and major television networks developed skateboarding interests. Critics called skating a fad, but a blueprint for success unfurled among believers.
In 1995, that blueprint – vague, rickety, and requiring a huge leap of faith – was activated by ESPN, which conceived the X Games as a made-for-TV showcase of emergent, high-octane sports. Backed by big-name sponsors, and driven by ESPN’s penchant for marketability that dramatised the skating milieu, the X Games made stars of Hawk and his contemporaries. It became the first marquee skateboarding championship of mainstream renown, and early flickers of limelight splashed the relatable competitors.
Hawk, in particular, attracted attention from sponsors and commercial backers – his photogenic appeal contributing to a wholesome persona. Hawk capitalised on his X Games notoriety by scoring brand deals while distributing his own merchandise. Offers found their way to skateboarding’s angelic face, and one – pertaining to an embryonic video game – changed his life, and his sport, forever.
That initial proposal came in 1997, when Hawk was approached by a software programmer about collaborating on a skateboarding video game. A self-confessed gamer, often frustrated by the paucity of playable skateboarding games, Hawk entertained the programmer, who arranged meetings with Midway and Nintendo, but interest never emerged and the coder quit. Hawk did not, and word spread that he was open to fronting a skateboarding video game. Soon, a consultant working for video game publisher Activision called Hawk with a proposition: to partner with subcontractor Neversoft, which was working on such a project.
At that time, in September 1997, the prototype character used by Neversoft in its nascent skateboarding title was Bruce Willis – a convenient holdover from Apocalypse, the previous game it completed. Hawk met with Neversoft and shared synergy with some of its top brass, which included avid skaters. An endorsement deal was agreed, making Hawk the eponymous main character, though he rejected the offer of a one-time buyout in favour of a percentage from each sale. In hindsight, that was a stroke of genius, as the game – Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater – enjoyed incredible commercial success.
Another stroke of fortune came just three months before Activision released the title, when Hawk landed the first 900 aerial spin in X Games history. Held aloft as a near-unattainable grail of skateboarding mastery, The 900 was incredibly difficult to execute, as Hawk demonstrated with 10 failed attempts before his magnum opus. Combined with iconic commentary from ESPN, positive press carried Hawk into the mainstream – coinciding sweetly with the launch of his game on 29 September 1999. The trick put Hawk top of mind, and the game sent him to the stratosphere.
With immersive graphics, an innovative gameplay engine and detailed first-person outlook, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater put gamers in control of various playable skaters, including Hawk, Chad Muska, Bob Burnquist and others. Different levels, posing novel skate backdrops, offered an opportunity to explore while gamers attempted to accumulate points by performing tricks. A ‘free skate’ mode proved particularly popular, allowing gamers to roam through an exciting world of skateparks, warehouses and alluring cityscapes without an overarching objective.
As such, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater offered vicarious joy to those who played it – adrenaline rushes without the threat of smashing your teeth on a metal bannister or banging your head off a concrete slab. Dopamine without the blood, essentially, which appealed to skateboard-curious generalists who could barely balance on a board, much less complete the audacious tricks that became common parlance.
An epochal soundtrack – with songs by Goldfinger, Rage Against the Machine, Dead Kennedys, The Vandals, Suicidal Tendencies, and others – created an enchanted atmosphere that made people want to spend time chilling with the game and its boundless possibilities for creative expression. Almost immediately, playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater became a great way to kick back and relax, accompanied by friends, takeaway pizza, and perhaps a little weed.
Back then, of course, people had to physically get together to mutually enjoy video games, rather than being hooked up to the internet, with its annoying jumble of wires, cables and ugly headphones. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater epitomised that real-life zest for computer-generated wanderlust. Remember the Game? podcast likened it to Minecraft for millennials, who escaped genuine problems – bills, work, heartbreak, illness – by pivoting to a pixelated playground.
Overall, there was just an innocent fun to the game, which offered a low barrier to entry and minimal stakes conducive to languid experimentation. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater was an expressive sandpit, a raw canvas onto which anybody could spill their creative impetus. It was also noticeably inclusive for its era, including a black skater, Kareem Campbell, and a female character, Elissa Steamer, though such intricate triumphs are often overlooked.
The game sold more than 350,000 copies before the end of 1999, and further iterations followed in 2000 and 2001. By then, a study from American Sports Data Inc. found that more Americans under the age of 18 rode skateboards (10.6 million) than played baseball (8.2 million). The same firm later reported a 60% increase in the number of skateboarders worldwide between 1999 and 2002, from 7.8 million to 12.5 million. That was The Tony Hawk Effect, and it sold skateboarding to the masses.
No longer the preserve of sunny American cities, skateboarding surged in global popularity. Even here in England, the Tony Hawk’s games were huge, and their crossover penetration – their ability to hook gamers previously unimpressed by, or even hostile towards, skateboarding – was unprecedented. My older brothers exemplified that trend. They were by no means skaters, but they played Tony Hawk’s incessantly. Once upon a time, such détente between Lacoste-wearing scallies and Vans-sporting skaters would have been inconceivable on British council estates. One video game series not only salved those divisions; it made skateboarding cool, aspirational, and rebellious – a vivid spigot of ferocious counterculture.
Almost overnight, Tony Hawk became a household name – synonymous with skateboarding and a living manifestation of its culture. For the longest time, I did not even know Tony Hawk was a real person, such was the outsized shadow cast by his pixelated avatar. And as a kid, I thought the character was called ‘Tony Hawks,’ or perhaps ‘Tony Hawkes,’ such was his trendiness conveyed by word of mouth.
Seemingly at once, Hawk endorsed Jeep, Hershey’s, Doritos and Mountain Dew. McDonald’s put Hawk figurines in Happy Meals. ESPN made him a skateboarding commentator. Nickelodeon viewers voted Hawk as their favourite male athlete, ahead of Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O’Neal and Tiger Woods. All the major nightly talk shows came calling, while book deals and documentary options followed an extravagant national tour. Hawk was even immortalised on The Simpsons – the classic litmus test for pop culture penetration – as the phenomenon gained a life of its own.
Some detractors called Hawk an overrated, greedy sellout, and accused him of jumping the shark as well as the halfpipe. With age, he became something of a meme, as the entire sensation became a little overwrought. But still, Hawk earned it. With passion and belief, the guy crafted an empire from his hobby. The business model never changed; only the volume and magnitude of opportunities did, propelled by Hawk’s hard work. And without Hawk, those skaters who criticised him probably would not have had a platform or audience to do so. Hawk also created a charitable foundation early in his stardom that has funded millions of dollars’ worth of skate-related enrichment projects, leaving a real legacy beyond the Hollywood ephemera.
For its part, Activision tried to replicate Hawk’s success with similar games in other extreme sports – Mat Hoffman’s Pro BMX, Shaun Palmer’s Pro Snowboarder, Kelly Slater’s Pro Surfer – but there was an ineffable magic to the skateboarding series. It captured a zeitgeist, defined a milieu, and transformed a sport into a hip, aspirational lifestyle. Few video games have had such a potent, long-lasting impact, and that legacy persists today.
“There is something in the spirit of Pro Skater and the skating community that connected with a generation, grounded in just enough verisimilitude to feel like the real world with a rascally spirit that didn’t speak exclusively to jocks like Madden or FIFA, but to gamers of all backgrounds and social strata,” wrote Sam Stone for Den of Geek. “The majority of the tunes that were on each soundtrack weren’t necessarily blowing up charts on TRL, while the skaters were rarely paradigms of conventional athleticism. The Pro Skater games invited everyone to jump in and play while its attention to detail and authenticity helped reinforce its contemporary qualities transitioning into early 2000s nostalgia.”
To wit, by 2007, the Tony Hawk’s series topped $1 billion in sales. By 2009, skateboarding had matured into a $4.8 billion industry. Annual iterations of the game, including spin-offs, continued through 2010, and it was not until Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5, in 2015, that critics soured on the franchise. Still, the game’s contributions to skateboarding culture – the tricks, music, vocabulary and daredevil dreaming – continued to compound, and a NextGen remake in 2020 inspired fresh fandom.
Post-Hawk, indeed, the rise of social media saw a natural merging of skateboarders and content creators, culminating in a curated virality that spurred new modes of professionalism. A surfeit of exposure stoked fresh and sustainable interest in skateboarding, lionising Hawk in nostalgic lore while approaching new frontiers.
In 2020, for instance, skateboarding debuted as an Olympic sport, and returned at the 2024 Games. Way back in 1998, before Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, established sports like triathlon, rugby and golf were not even Olympic sports, much less skateboarding – a niche pastime with a rough reputation. That such a gulf has been bridged, in such a minuscule amount of time, is miraculous. And much of that miracle can be traced to a pioneering video game with a modest budget.
On a personal note, a quarter-century after his meteoric rise, Hawk currently has a net worth of $140 million, according to media reports – a far cry from those 85 cent royalty checks. With 9.3 million followers on Instagram and an endless stream of endorsements, Hawk is an exemplar case study in entrepreneurship, perseverance and self-belief. Heck, in the American Dream writ large. Few have made so much from so little.
Still, aged 56, Hawk remains the most well-known skateboarder on earth. To many, he is the skateboarder. Most people cannot name another. And if they can plumb the depths of their memory, they will likely dredge up the name of a skater they played with in Hawk’s video game. The video game. And that is a neat barometer of Hawk’s legacy.
I, like many, still yearn for a true farewell – one last game, an ultimate version, harnessing the power of cutting-edge technology and emptying Hawk’s notebook. A more profound finale may be possible, though, because the 2028 Olympics will be held in Los Angeles, with skateboarding as a core event. By then, 30 years will have passed since Tony Hawk began working on his video game. What better way to mark the occasion than by having him compete? Sure, he will be 60, but surely they can grandfather him in – quite literally. After all, without him, the event would not exist.
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