This is the final installment of Game Cred: a collection of essays about video games to tie in with our latest Zine.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater: the title alone has enough power to resurface any nostalgic memory of sitting in front of a CRT television raking up the highest score possible. Released in 1999, it was a defining title, one that inspired a legion of gamers to pick up a skateboard in the same way The Velvet Underground & Nico inspired guitarists all over to start a band. Capitalizing on a growing trend in extreme sports, THPS took a difficult to master activity that required many hours of practice and made it accessible for everyone. Its accessibility was instrumental to making THPS the cultural touchstone it is still today; anyone could pick up a controller and hit gaps and nail combos they could only ever dream of.
Critically, it was a massive hit, with Doug Perry for IGN saying, “…there simply isn’t anything as complex physics-wise on a console — except perhaps Nintendo 64’s Wave Race 64 — as Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.” The PlayStation iteration of the game sits at 92 on Metacritic, and Activision’s financial report confirmed “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater ranking as the #1 domestic PlayStation title by units from October through December, according to TRSTS Data.” There simply was nothing like it, a fire that still burns to this day with last year’s release of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2, which also was well received.
Skateboarding has always been cool and it always will be cool, but back in 1999 (and even today) one couldn’t deny the boys club mentality that had taken effect on the sport. It’s not that girls and women didn’t skate, but more that the culture surrounding skating became enveloped by this pervasive masculine energy. No different from video games, or any male dominated field. It’s still there, but there’s been a noticeable shift in recent years as far as perception is concerned: girls have taken to the skate parks on TikTok and Instagram, and demonstrated an adept ability just as well as their male counterparts in the scene. Movies and shows like Skate Kitchen and Betty , Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You’re a Girl), and Skater Girl have shifted the narrative that skateboarding is merely a man’s sport, allowing for a more inclusive nature.
There’s more evidence of this within the Tokyo Summer Olympics which held its first skateboarding event. All the girls who medaled in Women’s street (Momiji Nishiya, Rayssa Leal, and Funa Nakayama) were under the age of 18. In the Women’s park event, both Kokona Hiraki and Sky Brown (both 13) won silver and bronze respectively, while Sakura Yosozumi (19) won gold. With the exception of gold medalist Keegan Palmer (18), every other male who medaled in both park and street events was over the age of 19. Not only were women and girls getting a chance at a worldwide spotlight to demonstrate their talents in a male-dominated sport, they were doing it at a much younger age.
Back in 2018 when asked about the male dominated nature of the sport, Rachelle Vinberg, star of Skate Kitchen and member of the instagram skateboard collective of the same name, in an interview with website Adolescent said, “When you hear ‘skateboarding,’ think about it — you associate it as being something guys do. If you look around at skateparks, you’re gonna see boys… In general, people think skateboarding’s just a guy thing. That’s why we’re trying to change it. We are trying to make it something we can all do.” The last statement feels very aligned with THPS’ ethos in game design with regards to their accessible and user friendly gameplay, but there’s a bit of an odd curiosity with the Tony Hawk series; there was only one female professional skater in the series from the series’ start in 1999 to 2003 with the release of Tony Hawk Underground. That skater is the incredibly talented and decorated Elissa Steamer.
It was the kind of fact that you couldn’t shake, the one that makes you question a central part of your history to make sure you’re remembering things correctly. There’s just no way that could possibly be true? How? Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater is such a beloved franchise, so important to a culture of skaters and gamers that its goodwill has managed to sustain it through terrible plastic peripherals, critically lambasted sequels, and a publisher’s own dirty laundry. It’s something most people probably never would have considered, certainly not me. Even more curious was her exclusion from the series after — and even more bewilderingly — the exclusion of professional female skaters entirely within the following two games: 2003’s Tony Hawk’s Underground 2 and 2005’s Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland. The series would then introduce Lyn-Z Adams Hawkins, Vanessa Torres, and Cara Beth Burnside in 2006’s Tony Hawk’s Project 8, 2007’s Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground, and 2009’s Tony Hawk Ride respectively. At this point the series was beginning to lose favor critically and commercially, with Tony Hawk Ride receiving some of the worst reviews in franchise history.
Now, to clear up a bit of a misconception; there are female skaters in the series that could be unlocked, but they weren’t real people, or at least they weren’t real professional skaters. This has to be mentioned because there was a female skater other than Elissa Steamer within THPS 1; Private Carrera, an unlockable character that by today’s standards would be very problematic, to put it mildly. A secret character that has existed from the series creation all the way to the third game in the series, Private Carrera may have been a reference to porn star Asia Carrera. This has been denied by series producer Ralph D’Amato and Tony Hawk himself; during a Q&A found within PlanetTonyHawk, Hawk said, “Private Carrera was the idea of a certain [influential] Neversoft employee. For the record, Carrera refers to a Porsche, not a porn star.” Ralph’s statement seems to back this up; during an interview with YouTuber oddheader, Ralph stated, “The fact of matter, Private Carerra was created by Noel Heins, the character artist that created all the original characters. He owned a Porsche and Carrera was his favorite car.”
So maybe she wasn’t based on a porn-star, but her bio would definitely lead one to believe so: “Originally from Roswell, NM, army brat Private Carrera is ready for action. If it’s hard… like skateboarding… she’s on it! Creator of such classic skate moves as the Ho Ho-Ho and Somi Spin, Carrera is always ready for some stiff competition.” Tasteful, and the added cherry on top? Her age in the character select screen has her as barely legal (the Nintendo 64 port of the game has her age as 41; I have to imagine the change came from Nintendo’s perception in America as the family console). So while they may not have gone through the trouble of licensing a porn star in those days, (they certainly seemed to take inspiration) they’d actually do so in THPS 4 with the unlockable character Daisy, who is based on porn star Jenna Jameson. Unlike Private Carrera, it is possible to unlock her through in-game objectives, and her cheat code isn’t elaborate at all: simply type in (o)(o). It’s the kind of low-brow humor equivalent of watching EuroTrip on Comedy Central: a byproduct of a time where you could get away with those sorts of things under the right circumstances, where boobs went a long way garnering ticket sales.
But why? Scott Pease, a producer of the series from THPS1 all the way to Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground, was happy to offer some insight and, as it turns out, it appears to have been a budgetary concern. “As to why not more female skaters — a good question — but space for Pro skaters was always at a premium, and hard choices had to be made, as there were always far more deserving candidates than we had space for in the games.” This in particular also seems to be backed up (though tangentially) by Andrew Reynolds, another professional skater who also appeared in the roster. In an interview with skateboard magazine Jenkem back in 2014, Andrew mentioned in an anecdote:
So for the first game, everybody got paid. Elissa Steamer, myself, whoever else was in it, we were laughing – we got like one check for royalties that was like $190,000 or something. We were like what! This is amazing! But then some pro skater, I don’t know who, went in to the offices and wanted to be in the game too. He told them he didn’t care about the money, he would be in the game for free. So management was like, well.. these guys will do it for free, let’s just give them a flat rate for the next game. So that’s what they started offering for the next games. It was a flat rate of 10k or something… But what are you gonna say, you know? I wasn’t in any position or felt like telling them that I didn’t want the 10k. And it was such a big game, so everyone said yeah. I really love that Elissa Steamer got $190,000 out of it too [laughs] that’s my favorite part.
There’s more to pick at with regards to companies’ refusal to pay talent what they’re owed, but the big takeaway from this quote is that Steamer was paid the same amount as her peers the first go around, having made more money off of one game than the next four games she featured in combined. It would make sense financially, but that can only go so far as a justification. It’d be one thing if Elissa was the only one for two games, but five gives the impression it was an oversight altogether.
Unlike most sports games that market the idea of playing as classic athletes, the THPS series never seemed to make it a selling point within their games. That may be because they never were a sports game to begin with, or at least not in the way we’ve come to understand sports titles today. Where the majority of sports video games (including wrestling!) were clamoring to showcase their inclusion of legends within their respective sport, with some boasting it as a chance to relive history, THPS never attempted this, squarely focused on capturing a specific energy: that late 80s/early 90s punk/rap vibe. There certainly were a number of deserving skaters that could make a fit for having their likeness thrown into the THPS series, skaters who still exist today.
Take for instance Peggy Oki, the lone female a part of the California skate team Z-Boys. During her time with the group, she placed first in the women’s freestyle event at Del Mar Nationals in 1975. She’s now an activist for the preservation of whales and dolphins, a part of her Origami Whales Project. Perhaps even Patti McGee, who in 1964 would go on to become the first women’s National Skateboard Champion of Santa Monica and featured on television from What’s My Line? (1950-67) to The Johnny Carson Show (1962-92). She’s still around and can be found on Instagram promoting the children’s book There Goes Patti McGee! which details how she won her greatest accolade. Maybe even the late great Ellen O’Neal, iconic freestyle skateboarder of the 70s. You may have seen a photo of her, both feet pressed against the front of her skateboard, hands up in the air as she balances while going downhill; the very same woman who was inducted into the Skateboarding Hall of Fame in 2014. Wouldn’t it have benefitted a generation to have these women also featured in a zeitgeist catching phenomenon of a franchise? “As to the 70’s stars… We didn’t really dip into that era of skateboarding with the game,” said Pease. “We were almost always focused on contemporary skaters and a couple of legends from the 80s here and there… So AFAIK [as far as I know] those names never came up.” This would make sense given the game’s previously mentioned energy, but it’s a shame it was never a consideration for future titles, or even as downloadable content.
There’s a case to be made for this form of inclusion, just as much as there’s a case to be made against it. Current sports titles, now equipped with better technology, can allow for players to simply build their own characters and avatars to fulfill their sports dreams and fantasies. The 2K sports series has been moving forward with their MyCareer modes for years, and even the game series Skate featured it in lieu of licensing out skaters like their competitor (though it should be said that the Skate series also doesn’t feature any licensed professional female skaters either). In those games, players can find empowerment within themselves as opposed to pigeonholing someone into that role for them. There’s also the matter of where this inclusion comes from; with current lawsuits against Activision for engaging in toxic workplace practices and sexual harassment, and news that grows worse and worse by the hour, it might feel hollow and inappropriate coming from them.
It still begs the question: would the ability to play as these legends of skateboarding have directly influenced girls and women to skate, any more than boys and men playing as Tony Hawk would? When asked in an interview with skateboard website isTia.tv if a piece of media — the novel Gidget by Frederick Kohner released in 1957, about a teenage girl surfing in Malibu — had influenced her to practice surfing, Patti McGee responded, “Gidget was cute and yes I suppose she led the way although it didn’t influence me to surf, I would have done it one way or the other… The beach scene at Malibu was tight and the story was lived out there every day.” With the amount of exposure the sport has garnered, and the community itself simply growing and evolving with social media, it might not be necessary anymore to pay $60 for a game with Tony Hawk’s name on it to feel properly represented. It’s everywhere now; in history, movies and shows, on social media, and at the Olympics letting us all know that skateboarding belongs to everyone.
