Elissa Steamer can keep in mind what skateboarding videogames had been like earlier than 1999.
She didn’t play a ton of them, and as a child she was extra prone to hearth up Mike Tyson’s Punch Out or The Legend of Zelda when she was skipping college. However there was 720, launched in arcades and on the unique Nintendo. Equally, there was City & Nation Surf Designs: Wooden & Water Rage, one other NES recreation that mixed browsing and skating. Skate or Die! was one other with 8-bit graphics.
However as Steamer remembers, “none of them actually felt like skateboarding… It was very Nineteen Eighties.”
Someday within the late Nineties, Steamer heard that some firm was making a online game that Tony Hawk was hooked up to. On the time, Steamer was then a budding skilled skateboarder who had offers with firms like Toy Machine and Baker, and had featured in a number of the straight-to-VHS skating tapes that had been fashionable round that point — most notably 1996’s Welcome to Hell the place people can see a then-21-year-old Steamer grinding on benches and pulling off kickflips whereas sporting saggy pants and a few crisp white Adidas kicks as a monitor from The Sundays performs over the grainy footage.
Sooner or later, she discovered herself hanging out within the storage of fellow professional skater Jamie Thomas who had a pattern copy of 1999’s Tony Hawk’s Professional Skater. Steamer fooled round with the sport a bit on Thomas’ PlayStation, and he or she was blown away by its feel and appear. Thomas then informed her, “I believe they’re going to achieve out to you too.”
A number of days later, Steamer was on the cellphone with the sport’s makers, Activision and Neversoft, who pitched her on the thought of being within the recreation. Having already performed a model of it, Steamer didn’t hesitate to enroll. And that’s how she turned the primary girl to be featured in a Tony Hawk online game.
Now, 26 years later, the impression of that first recreation continues to be being felt. Numerous individuals from in and out of doors of skating have credited it with pushing the game into the consciousness of popular culture and making it extra accessible to a wider viewers. Books have been written about it, documentaries have been produced, and considerate essays about its resonance had been penned at locations just like the New York Occasions and NPR. Sport Informer named it one of many 100 Biggest Video Video games of All-Time. As youngsters and adults alike performed Graffiti, H.O.R.S.E. and Trick Assault, they had been uncovered to a gnarly soundtrack and the tradition round skateboarding. A lot of them fell in love with it.
“I imply, at the moment, skateboarding was fairly low key, and I believe that simply form of boosted skateboarding into the mainstream,” Steamer not too long ago informed SB Nation. “You didn’t have to have the ability to journey a skateboard to see skateboarding. You would kind of take part in a recreation that portrayed skateboarding in such an effective way. It bought eyes on skateboarding and our names and who we had been.
“I believe lots of the early 2000s skateboarding growth was form of on account of this online game.”
For the reason that success of the unique THPS in 1999, the sport has produced 20 extra variations and sequels. And Steamer has appeared in various them, with the newest being no exception.
Tony Hawk’s Professional Skater 3 + 4 — the totally remade from the bottom up variations of sequels initially launched in 2001 and 2002 — dropped on July 11. The remake blends what followers liked about these classics with fashionable upgrades, new methods, additions to the soundtrack, distinctive parks and on-line play.
And there’s extra skaters too. Lengthy gone are the times the place Steamer was the one playable girl within the recreation. Tony Hawk’s Professional Skater 3 + 4 options eight ladies skaters and in addition Leo Baker, who identifies as transgender and makes use of they/them pronouns.
Steamer, who not too long ago celebrated her fiftieth birthday, appears like the sport’s rising inclusion of girls, minorities and LGBTQ+ people has performed a big function in exposing skateboarding to extra individuals.
“We’ve discovered that in the event you see someone such as you doing one thing you wish to do, then you realize you are able to do it,” Steamer says. “So, yeah, it’s completely been useful to ladies, transgender, queer individuals. The sport’s actually inclusive, because the world is changing into and must be. The perfect factor about skateboarding is that there’s no guidelines. Simply anarchy.”
Nora Vasconcellos was 7-years-old when the primary THPS hit the cabinets of online game shops. She grew up in New England in what she calls “Cranberry lavatory land” the place there have been lots of barns however not many paved driveways. Merely put, she wasn’t surrounded by skate tradition. Nonetheless, Vasconcellos couldn’t shake her curiosity in skating and consumed it by way of books and magazines she would get on the library.
Then THPS arrived and he or she quickly discovered herself enjoying as usually as she may at her cousin’s home or on the small TV in her brother’s room.
“I simply really feel like all the things from the music to actually studying who Elissa Steamer was, that was by way of a online game,” Vasconcellos, now 33, informed SB Nation. “It was one of many avenues that I bought to discover skating.”
One of many ranges in THPS 3 is known as “Skater’s Island.” It’s within the newest re-release too and is predicated on an actual skatepark in Rhode Island that was destroyed in 2004. Vasconcellos by no means bought to skate there regardless of dwelling comparatively shut, however bought to expertise it by way of the sport.
“It’s fairly humorous, what will get ingrained in your thoughts,” Vasconcellos says. “I simply keep in mind individuals telling me how sick it was, after which I get to love, form of relive it, by way of the online game.”
After enjoying as Steamer in a number of the previous video video games, Vasconcellos blossomed into knowledgeable skater. She received a gold medal on the 2017 Vans Park Sequence World Championships and signed with Adidas. One among her skateboards is within the Smithsonian, however being in a Tony Hawk online game appears to come back with extra social forex than that or different milestones she’s hit in her profession.
“There’s lots of people from all corners of my life who can’t possibly perceive what it means to get a Thrasher cowl, or can’t possibly perceive getting a professional shoe… However they do perceive, like, ‘You’re a playable character on Tony Hawk’s Professional Skater,’ as a result of that’s lots of people’s solely interplay with skateboarding. So, it’s very cool.”
Vasconcellos and Steamer are two of the eight badass ladies featured in Tony Hawk’s Professional Skater 3 + 4. The others are Lizzie Armanto, Letícia Bufoni, Chloe Covell, Margielyn Didal, Rayssa Leal and Aori Nishimura.
For Vasconcellos, she appears to imagine that if it weren’t for Steamer in 1999, she won’t be making her THPS debut in 2025.
“There wasn’t a complete lot of girls who had been making careers out of skateboarding. I believe seeing how that’s blown up… Should you’re a girl, you weren’t getting the larger offers, you had been form of getting scraps. So, it’s form of cool to see that full circle facet of it now,” Vasconcellos says. “Granted, we’re not all shopping for homes off the Tony Hawk recreation anymore, however again within the day, they did, and that was an avenue for these skaters to create wealth and be themselves. For a lady like me on the time to play and envision myself in that house, it’s fairly cool.”
Skateboarding is arguably as mainstream because it has ever been and the Tony Hawk video video games are an enormous motive why. In 2028 in Los Angeles, skateboarding will seem within the Olympics for the third time.
Again when she was piling up gold medals on the X-Video games within the mid-2000s, Steamer — the primary girl to go professional in skateboarding and the primary girl ever inducted into the Skateboarding Corridor of Fame — thought there was an opportunity the game may attain the Summer season Video games sometime. Now that they’ve, she will get to take a seat again, watch and take a look at all of the superior younger skaters come by way of on a path that she helped pave.
“I believe the way forward for skating is in good palms,” Steamer says. “I’m simply stoked that the sport is again and I’m pleased to be concerned. It’s actually nice for skateboarding, and I believe Tony Hawk is unbelievable.”
