Hi, I’m Hamish Black and welcome to Writing on Games. Believe it or not, there was a point
in time where the notion of accurately representing the art of skateboarding was most effectively
realised, well… here. We live in a post-Skate world; we've seen how realistic the depictions
of skateboarding can be. As such, the idea that the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series started
off as a means of legitimising the sport in the eyes of the mainstream may seem a little
absurd. I mean just… look at it. Look at the speed
at which you careen through these places where skateboarders probably shouldn’t be, how
high you go, how seemingly effortlessly you glide around the entire level coming across
super weird scenarios along the way. I mean, it's fairly well accepted at this
stage that the series met a slow, ungracious demise. This was a result of superfluous sequels
that superficially attempted to cash in on the culture; forcing dated, juvenile aesthetics
in your face. Well, what made those older games different? Aside from branding, what
here is actually indicating an accurate portrayal of the sport?
Well, I would go as far as to say that 3 remains one of the most streamlined representations
of the mindset behind skating that gaming has seen, precisely because of its heightened
artifice as a video game. Through the abstract nature of its mechanics as they relate to
actual skating, 3 is able to timelessly convey what it means to skate.
Let's take a step back for a minute. See, I was able to pick up 3 again recently thanks
to a lull in the barrage of new releases that has characterised the start of 2017 and man,
it’s remarkable how well that game holds up. I played it for hours actively trying
to find flaws in the game’s design and honestly, I came up short. It plays like it could have
been released yesterday. Every one of the game’s systems is perfectly tuned to create
a stunningly pure gaming experience, carefully iterating on the vision laid out by the first
two games while avoiding the superfluity of future titles. It's through this purity that
the game can present its vision of the sport. How do we define that purity? You could sum
up Tony Hawk 3’s player goal as follows – maintain fluid, balanced movement through
a level while making the numbers as big as possible within a two-minute time limit. Now
let’s examine Underground 2, where you build up a team of pro skaters and some of the Jackass
cast in order to travel the world meandering through different environments before activating
a particular goal that might have you skating or it might have you controlling Steve-O riding
a bull and the goal is to create as much chaos as possible sometimes but sometimes it’s
also to get a high score I guess and there’s nut shots and Bam’s dad is fat and sometimes
there’s a time limit and sometimes there’s not. To say it’s diffuse would be to put
it lightly. On the other hand, Tony Hawk 3 is so focused
that, to me, it doesn't even matter that the characters are on skateboards. On a mechanical
level, it's not really about skating – it’s solely about movement, and that movement ain’t
exactly realistic. By 3 you have both manuals and reverts, meaning
you can essentially maintain a combo throughout the length, width and height of a level if
you wanted to. It’s not about how stylish the tricks you pull off are, it’s about
how many you can fit in before you hit the ground. Individual tricks don’t provide
many points, but when each trick adds to a score multiplier, quantity rather than quality
becomes the incentive. The time limit adds a sense of urgency to proceedings without
becoming frustrating, due to the near instantaneous nature of restarting a run. Do you see what
I’m getting at here? Tony Hawk 3 is not Skate – it’s not realistically representing
skating through the streets. It is sheer artifice – it is quintessentially a video game.
It evokes the mechanical coherence of old high-score arcade games which are easy to
pick up and play, but immensely difficult to master. It’s the kind of game you can
complete in four minutes, but the discipline required to get to that point is where the
depth of the game lies. Tony Hawk 3 is about skateboarding in the same way Asteroids is
about going on a space adventure. Sure, it’s technically what you do, but it's also more
mechanical than that – more artificial. And the game is better for this artifice!
3, at its core, is about training yourself to get better through discipline and understanding
of the mechanics of what you’re trying to do. Once you internalise this, you begin to
see the world in a different way. You see every part of the
world as a means to push the boundaries of it even further. Every trivial rail, each
inconsequential elevation shifts in its intended purpose, instead becoming a means of getting
you to places you couldn’t previously go. Once you get there, you know you achieved
that through your own skill, making it feel all the more satisfying. What I just said
could be applied to either Tony Hawk 3 or any number of interviews given by the Birdman
talking about his love of the sport. I think that says a lot about how the focus on overtly
game-y mechanics represent the purity of the sport, no matter how abstract it may seem
visually. And it's clear that 3 represented a peak of
sorts in this endeavour. Even 4 removing something as seemingly trivial as the time limit may
have offered more freedom to explore, but also removed any urgency from or reason for
maintaining fluid movement. More egregiously, however, we then saw the
addition of full blown narratives to proceedings in the Underground series, which at the start
saw you aspiring to be Chad Muska (of all people), and later saw full-blown celebrities
representing a more juvenile side to the sport. The CKY prank side of things was an important
part of the culture's evolution for sure, but focusing on it so heavily diluted the
lucidity of vision seen in previous games. Put it this way - people will play Tony Hawk
3 in years to come and get an idea of what it represents fairly immediately. People will
play Underground 2 and say "who the hell is Bam Margera and why do people treat this idiot
with such reverence?" It's why Skate became the dominant franchise of the sport – it
ultimately represented the same values that later Tony Hawk games left behind, albeit
in a more grounded, realistic fashion. Those later titles showed skating as a status
symbol; as a means of sticking it to the man and getting people to listen when you shout
"GET OUT OF MY ROOM, MOM", rather than a means of teaching you about yourself, the world
around you and how you can overcome your limitations. By emphasising cultural aesthetics over streamlined
design, the later titles placed themselves in such a specific point in time that they
felt dated and tired almost as soon as they launched. People quickly grow out of
that rebellious phase and almost always look back on it with utter disdain. In the
same way, people tend to look back on the titles that pushed it so hard and it's not
unreasonable to say that some might blame them for the death of that particular brand
of skate culture. As a whole, though, it never really died out.
It might lean more towards the fringes of the mainstream now, but it’s also not driven
by the same kind of teen angst and nut shots that made the games look like the cast of
Jackass directed a Green Day video. Instead, there's a desire to creatively navigate the
world around us; to see the world differently, as something conquerable both spatially and
philosophically. There’s something childlike to this desire, sure – it’s an escape
from the constraints of everyday life by going faster and higher than anyone else. However,
there’s also a maturity to maintaining the discipline required to learn a craft and hone
one’s skills to do things that others can’t. Essentially, skateboarding as it stands represents
a desire to grow - something the distinctly game-y mechanics of Tony Hawk 3 wholly reflect.
Games like Underground 2 and American Wasteland wallow in the aesthetics of the juvenile, attempting
to cash in on the rebellious phase all teens go through. By rejecting that dated perception
of skate culture, by focusing on the clarity and depth of its systems 3 was able to capture
a far more distilled vision of what it meant to skate. As such, it feels just as fresh
now as it did all those years ago. So I hope you enjoyed this piece on Tony Hawk
3. If you did, why not click subscribe (like 50000 other people have done, holy moly),
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very much for watching and I'll see you next time.