Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2: Can You Feel the Love?
Hey Bryn,
It is kind of unexpected that 2020 has been a banner year for skateboarding games, right? Between Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 and Skater XL, we have been treated to two of the best skateboarding games in, well, ages. But Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 is speacial, in fact it is my game of the year. This is in part due to nostalgia, but it is mainly just surprising that they actually did it. They nailed it. We actually have a new Tony Hawk game that is utterly fantastic.
After years and years of mediocre-to-downright-awful entries in the franchise—Project 8 was okay and I’ll stand by that—the franchise has come full circle. A remake of the two original Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games that walks the fine line between remaking and reimagining. On the one hand, the levels are more-or-less how I remember them being when I first burned through these games on a small CRT TV in my childhood bedroom in an old house that is now long gone. But it also flirts with reimagining. There are new challenges in some missions, new skaters have been added, the character creator is fluid and devoid of gender binaries, and new songs have been added to the game (sadly). Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 is also imbued with a relatively unique feeling in games—positivity that never feels forced. It is almost just understood, and it is rarely, if ever, vocalized. Through design, aesthetics, and the sheer flow of gameplay, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 ends up feeling like a ray of light in a cloudy year. For all of the new bells and whistles and the fact that Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 is my game of the year, it is more than that. It is a reckoning that has made me reflect on my childhood not through a lens of nostalgia, but more matter of factly and just how skateboarding influenced almost every facet of my being. I am going to expand on this but, Bryn, I’d love to know more about your history with these games and what they mean to you in both the past and the here and now.
Skateboarding has been a huge part of my life since I was five years old. It has seen me through some of the hardest times in my life. Skateboarding was there even after those all-too-long stretches where I let life get in the way of myself and skateboarding. It happens, but even if you only stepped on a board once, if that made you feel something, then you are a skateboarder. And you always will be. The Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games introduced a whole generation to the act of skateboarding and the culture around it. Thus this remake is bound to be nostalgic, and it is. But what makes it so meaningful for me, is that it never loses sight of skateboarding in its recreation of some games from, like, twenty years ago.
Skateboarding is a fluid sport. There are no rules, and the culture is ever changing—from baggy pants to skinny jeans, things are always changing. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 shows that skateboarding has changed for the better. It is a more inclusive community, though there is still more work to do, and this remake reflects that. I remember being bullied at the skatepark for various reasons and I know that that lessened over time as I got better, but it also lessened because I stopped going to skateparks. My friends and I took to the streets. This relates to Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 +2 in the sense that the levels that are actually skateparks have, in a weird way, let me reclaim some of my childhood skateboarding time that never happened at skateparks, or was negative to begin with. There is none of that in this game.
The Skatestreet map reminds me of an indoor skatepark I went to as a kid, and I find myself playing on this map over and over again. A part of me keeps telling myself that it is just one of the best maps, but I know better. I’m replaying memories I never got to have because I was bullied at that park. Instead of dropping into the bowl, I’d try and hold back tears as I focused really hard on getting a soda from the vending machine. Times change. No one bullies me at skate parks anymore and I do my best to be kind. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 never directly tells us to be kind, but I can feel it in there, can’t you?
