Elissa Steamer can bear 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 more likely to fireplace up Mike Tyson’s Punch Out or The Legend of Zelda when she was skipping faculty. 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 Eighties.”
Someday within the late Nineteen Nineties, Steamer heard that some firm was making a online game that Tony Hawk was connected to. On the time, Steamer was then a budding skilled skateboarder who had offers with corporations like Toy Machine and Baker, and had featured in a few of the straight-to-VHS skating tapes that had been common round that point — most notably 1996’s Welcome to Hell the place of us can see a then-21-year-old Steamer grinding on benches and pulling off kickflips whereas sporting dishevelled pants and a few crisp white Adidas kicks as a monitor from The Sundays performs over the grainy footage.
At some point, 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 she or he was blown away by its feel and appear. Thomas then informed her, “I feel they’re going to succeed in out to you too.”
A couple of days later, Steamer was on the cellphone with the sport’s makers, Activision and Neversoft, who pitched her on the concept 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 lady to be featured in a Tony Hawk online game.
Now, 26 years later, the influence of that first recreation remains to be being felt. Numerous individuals from in and outdoors 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. Recreation Informer named it one of many 100 Biggest Video Video games of All-Time. As children 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 feel 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 trip a skateboard to see skateboarding. You would type of take part in a recreation that portrayed skateboarding in such a good way. It received eyes on skateboarding and our names and who we had been.
“I feel a variety of the early 2000s skateboarding growth was form of on account of this online game.”
Because the success of the unique THPS in 1999, the sport has produced 20 extra variations and sequels. And Steamer has appeared in numerous them, with the most recent 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 lady within the recreation. Tony Hawk’s Professional Skater 3 + 4 options eight girls skaters and likewise Leo Baker, who identifies as transgender and makes use of they/them pronouns.
Steamer, who not too long ago celebrated her fiftieth birthday, looks like the sport’s rising inclusion of girls, minorities and LGBTQ+ of us has performed a big position in exposing skateboarding to extra individuals.
“We’ve discovered that when you see someone such as you doing one thing you need to do, then you understand you are able to do it,” Steamer says. “So, yeah, it’s completely been useful to girls, transgender, queer individuals. The sport’s actually inclusive, because the world is changing into and ought to be. One of the best 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 a variety 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 she or he quickly discovered herself taking part in as typically 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 pieces 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 received 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 received to skate there regardless of dwelling comparatively shut, however received to expertise it by way of the sport.
“It’s fairly humorous, what will get ingrained in your thoughts,” Vasconcellos says. “I simply bear 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 taking part in as Steamer in a few of the previous video video games, Vasconcellos blossomed into an expert skater. She received a gold medal on the 2017 Vans Park Collection World Championships and signed with Adidas. Considered one of her skateboards is within the Smithsonian, however being in a Tony Hawk online game appears to come back with extra social foreign money 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 perhaps perceive what it means to get a Thrasher cowl, or can’t perhaps 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 girls 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 consider that if it weren’t for Steamer in 1999, she won’t be making her THPS debut in 2025.
“There wasn’t an entire lot of girls who had been making careers out of skateboarding. I feel seeing how that’s blown up… For those who’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 side 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 woman 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 lady to go professional in skateboarding and the primary lady 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 feel the way forward for skating is in good arms,” Steamer says. “I’m simply stoked that the sport is again and I’m comfortable to be concerned. It’s actually nice for skateboarding, and I feel Tony Hawk is unimaginable.”
