When I was a newborn, my sister accidentally dropped me while roller skating down a slide. It’s not as bad as it sounds – she caught me in the fall, managing to break her arm in the process. From that point on, however, roller skates, skateboards, and pretty much anything with wheels were forbidden in our home. I didn’t even learn to properly ride a bike until I was at university, thought this was never really an issue because I didn’t know what I was missing – I had only ever heard my parents’ repeated warnings about my near-death experience and how these “toys” had no place in any decent, God-fearing Muslim household. Until one fateful day in a remarkably conventional computer repair shop just around the corner from my childhood home, I staunchly believed that action sports were not for me.
By the early years of the twenty-first century, Hawk was already considered one of the most influential skateboarders of all time, and certainly a household name among the MTV generation to which my elder sister proudly belonged. A few years previously, Hawk had become the first skateboarder to land the infamous 900 at the San Francisco X-Games – a trick that involved performing a two-and-a-half aerial spin on a ramp. He had failed 11 times and was successful on his twelfth attempt, the trick representing a new era of skate culture due to its unprecedented difficulty and technical pizzazz. Hawk’s 900 and the buzz around the X-Games arguably helped take skateboarding into the mainstream, and just a few months later, Activision and Neversoft would boost this even further with the release of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. The classic skateboarding video game series allows players to explore levels, perform impossible tricks and complete objectives, choosing from real-life pro skaters as their avatars along the way.
“I went to Activision when they first contacted me to play a sample of what they were working on,” Hawk told Rolling Stone’s Tim Latterner in 2024 about the birth of the game franchise. “They had an engine and animations that could do some tricks. They knew enough about skating generally at that time because the X-Games were coming in strong and skating had evolved a lot over the 1980s to be more technical tricks and street skating was more of a thing. It was pretty obvious that the game was intuitive and that it was fun to play even for those who don’t skate.”
Hawk’s last sentence resonates with my own skate-deprived childhood. On a fateful day in 2002, I’d been dragged to that local computer shop by my dad and sister, hoping for sweets from the nearby newsagent. The shop was jam-packed with electronics, gadgets and devices; a dull place for any kid, except that in the corner, the staff had set up a special display for the recently released Nintendo GameCube. While my dad and sister were busy, I sat in the corner with the GameCube, enraptured not by the console, but what was on it. Or, more specifically, the music being pumped out of the small TV speaker.
“Proud, proud is to hear it all yeah,” Alien Ant Farm’s ‘Wish’ rumbled out, as I controlled my Tony Hawk avatar aimlessly around the first level in Pro Skater 3, set in a steelworks foundry. It’s fairly simple in terms of gameplay; there are rails and quarterpipes, a series of catwalks, and pools of molten metal. While I clumsily wrestled with the controller, the game cycled through an array of tracks – CKY’s ‘96 Quite Bitter Beings’, KRS One’s ‘Hush’ and Adolescents’ ‘Amoeba’. My little mind was well and truly blown as I was ushered through the gateway into a world of punk and hip-hop. I suddenly saw skateboarding in an entirely different light – no longer as something dangerous or even nefarious, but a meeting of the digital, physical and sonic realms.
There was no going back. Over the following years, I played almost every game in the Tony Hawk franchise as their music soundtracked my adolescence. I discovered the Ramones, House of Pain, Public Enemy, Dead Kennedy…
