A few years back, I was talking to my roommate about how we would fortify our apartment in
the event of a Home Alone scenario,
and I made some offhand joke about a punji pit.
And he said, “OH YEAH! Like in Tony Hawk!”
And I said, “And also the Vietnam War.”
And he replied, “THE VIETNAM WAR?”
My roommate thought a punji pit was just a silly term for a spike trap
invented by Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2.
And though that is extremely funny, I can’t really fault him for that.
That conversation made me realize that there’s probably an entire generation of people,
myself included,
who were introduced to a terrifying guerrilla warfare tactic from a skateboarding video game.
And ever since that conversation,
I have been haunted by one question:
Why did they put a “pungee pit” into Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2?
If you don’t know what I’m referencing, let’s start with the game.
In Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2, Neversoft introduced the park editor,
which let you create your own skate park.
It wasn’t especially robust, but it had everything you’d need:
ramps, rails, pipes,
and a dirty hole full of sharpened sticks.
Now, a spike pit in a video game isn’t strange. They are an integral part of platformers.
And even Tony Hawk is no stranger to danger.
Though Pro Skater 2 wasn’t quite as ridiculous as say American Wasteland,
there were still plenty of places to perish.
But the weird thing is that it isn’t just a run-of-the-mill, medieval-dungeon-grade spike pit.
It’s specifically called a “Pungee Pit.”
And what is a punji pit?
In the late 1800s, The British Indian Army was off doing British Empire shit in Burma,
and the Kachin people did not like that,
so they devised sharpened stick traps for defense.
The British called them “punji sticks,” which most likely derives from the Kachin language.
But the thing that really made punji sticks seep into the American consciousness was the Vietnam War.
The Vietnam War was a period that most historians have designated as
“An Extremely Shitty Time.”
But the important thing to note for this video is that when the Viet Cong and the Americans were fighting,
there was a massive power imbalance,
so the Viet Cong relied on guerrilla warfare to help even that playing field.
“In opposing an American force equipped with the most sophisticated armamentarium ever used in warfare,
the Viet Cong continue to supplement their modern weapons with implements
similar to those devised by their ancestors.”
This quote comes from a 1967 paper published in the Annals of Surgery.
It’s a case study all about punji stick wounds, and it highlights a lot of the ways
punji sticks were used, including the pit.
The Tony Hawk idea of a punji pit is one where you fall 20 feet while doing a Pizza Guy and instantly die,
but real punji sticks were more effective at injuring soldiers and taking them out of the field.
In this case study, over a third of the wounds due to hostile action were caused by punji sticks,
and they took a soldier out of combat for an average of three weeks.
What was essentially well-hidden, sharpened bamboo had a massive toll on the American army.
These sharpened stick traps became a symbol for guerrilla tactics.
And in 1983, the UN’s Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons went into effect,
banning things like booby traps and mines. This included punji sticks.
But as people started to grapple with the atrocities of the Vietnam War,
punji sticks started showing up in more Vietnam War related media.
In First Blood, the Vietnam vet Rambo makes something akin to a “Malayan gate”
to stop a police officer in the woods.
“Somebody help me! Help me, Will!”
It’s brutal!
And grisly action films aren’t the only place these violent and terrifying punji sticks appear. They also show up in
the FUN AND LIGHTHEARTED SKATEBOARDING VIDEO GAME: TONY HAWK’S PRO SKATER 2.
The punji pit never bothered me as a kid,
and I’ve had a lot of trouble trying to put into words exactly why it’s haunting me now.
Originally, I thought it’s because it “ruins my suspension of disbelief,”
but these games already have ridiculous scenarios,
like Elderly Sex Clown Gene Simmons being able to do a boardslide in platform boots.
It was only once I learned about the punji pit’s historical roots that it became an issue,
which means it might be a scary version of something called Fridge Logic.
Fridge Logic is the modern term for an Icebox Scene, an idea that supposedly originated with Alfred Hitchcock.
The story goes that when asked about a small plot hole in Vertigo,
he responded that you don’t notice the inconsistency until
“... you've gone home and start pulling cold chicken out of the icebox.”
Fridge Logic doesn’t affect you while you’re watching the movie, but a few hours later,
after giving it some thought, you go, “Hey wait a second.”
But the situation with the punji pit goes one step further...
into Fridge Horror.
This is the same delayed reaction but instead of going “Hey wait a second,”
it becomes, “HEY WAIT A SECOND!”
Fridge Horror is one of the Pokemon fandom’s favorite pastimes.
You never really thought much about the implications of ghost types as a 6 year old,
but now, you are burdened with the knowledge of death,
so Gengar just hits different.
Tony Hawk could have avoided the Fridge Horror entirely by just…
not referencing a UN-banned guerilla warfare tactic.
Call it a spike pit, Neversoft.
And that makes me believe there must be a reason why developers did this.
And I will get to the bottom of this 20-year-old mystery.
I reached out to a number of ex-Neversoft employees
with a request for a video interview about this very simple question.
And then... I waited.
*elevator music*
And to be perfectly honest, I thought that might be how this video was going to end.
The game was published 20 years ago.
The majority of Neversoft employees have moved on to different projects or left the game industry entirely.
Neversoft doesn’t even exist as a studio any more.
It’s ridiculous to ask them to remember why one tiny piece of a game
they made two decades ago was named a certain way.
But then: A glimmer of hope.
I received an email back from Mick West.
Once a designer and programmer, he’s now a professional writer and conspiracy theory debunker.
When I saw his name in my inbox, I knew I had struck gold.
Well, it was unrefined gold, but I had faith that he would be the person to know
why they went with a punji pit, so long as I gave him the time he required to go ba-
Okay.
59 minutes later, he had gone through old emails and code and it turned up nothing.
But he also sent over some of the pungee script code from THPS3
and the original pungee pit sound effect.
*terrible squishing noise*
Haha.
*the same noise played again*
Ahhh.
You win some, you lose some!
*upbeat ska music*
But what’s this! I received one more email from Scott Pease, the studio development director at Neversoft.
And it started in the most promising way imaginable:
“Brian -
Uh oh!”
Though his email states that he can “neither confirm nor deny that watching First Blood
at an impressionable age might also have influenced this decision in a subtle way….”
The truth is... he can’t even remember if it was his idea or someone else’s entirely.
Scott’s email hints at wanting to do something memorable and unique,
and naming your spike pit a “Pungee Pit” certainly does that.
There’s no way that my roommate or I would have remembered this weird piece of gaming ephemera
if it wasn’t called a “Pungee Pit.”
So… Mission accomplished.
And in case you were as interested as I am,
you’ll be happy to know that in the remake of Pro Skater 1+2, there is still a park editor and…
The “Pungee Pit” doesn’t exist.
There isn’t a spike pit at all!
It appears that the 20 years between the original and the remake
has changed game development enough that someone other than me asked,
“Hey, why is there a Pungee pit here?”
Nowadays, most AAA games need an explanation for every minor detail,
but back in the early days of Pro Skater, you could...
just have a punji pit,
and no one would ask you about it.
Until 20 years later, when some asshole clogs up your inbox with requests for an interview.
But that silly choice still had ramifications,
and it ended up haunting me two decades after the fact.
But, like, a friendly haunting, like Casper.
The truth is sometimes creators just do a thing because they can,
and it isn’t much deeper than that.
Anyway, here’s the sound of falling into the “Pungee Pit” 30 times in a row.
*squishing noise repeating 30 times*
That’s good sound design, I’ll tell you what. Mm.
Love it.
*squishing noise stops*
No, let’s keep it going! Let’s just keep it going!
*squishing noise starts again* You know, why not! Ha ha!