Tricks, Kickflips, and Thumbsticks: An Oral History of the Making of ‘Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater’

Editor’s note, Friday, September 4, 2020: The remasters of the first two Tony Hawk’s Pro Skaters arrive on Friday, 21 years after the initial installment’s debut. To mark the occasion, we’re revisiting last year’s oral history of the first Tony Hawk game, featuring interviews with the team behind its creation, contributors to its soundtrack, and Tony Hawk himself. So before you break out your nosegrinds and ollies, re-live how the classic series came to be.

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“Skateboarding is not a crime.” As a slogan in 2019, it’s antiquated to the point of hilarity. Who in the hell would be threatened by skateboarding? Maybe your dad, worried you won’t hang out with him at the park anymore so he can show off his mild ollie skills while wearing a Pavement shirt. Two decades ago, though, record store windows, bathroom stalls in dank punk clubs, and the bumpers of weary Toyota Corollas bore that slogan with utter seriousness and conviction. Skating was no joke in 1999. Good news for Tony Hawk.

By the end of the ’90s, Hawk had already been skating professionally for the better part of two decades. He’d seen an entire incarnation of skate culture rise and fall through the ’80s, watching Nash wide boards and vertical ramp competitions fade even as boarders like Rodeny Mullen invented new tricks that would define the era that would make Hawk an international star. The street skating world that replaced it felt raw and sexy, a way of life rather than a sport. Fuzzed-out homemade VHS tapes showed people doing impossibly dangerous, funny tricks tracked to shredded, powerful tunes; as the ’90s bloomed, skating found a new soul and a far bigger stage.

Skate video games cut a similar line during those years. In Hawk’s early years, skate games were plentiful and beloved by arcade rats. Atari’s legendary 720 Degrees, with its blocky, primary-colored suburban playground, was 1986 incarnated, devouring people’s quarters after luring them in with its signature boombox cabinet. Skate or Die took that setting into B-movie territory, with Mohawked skaters pummeling each other with American Gladiators–style jousting staffs in dirty, emptied swimming pools.

As ’80s big-air skating withered and toughened into the spiked righteousness of street skating, though, skate video games became relics of the past. It wasn’t until skating and Tony Hawk himself reached a perfect moment at the end of the following decade—when skating felt perfectly balanced between counterculture cool and mainstream ubiquity—that skate games returned. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater wasn’t just a skate game when it came out 20 years ago Saturday. It was a phenomenon, a work that, as Hawk himself explains, simultaneously ignited his career and overshadowed it.

And it happened almost entirely by accident. Both the game’s creators at the now-defunct studio Neversoft and its producers at Activision knew when they started making Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater that they were producing something magical, infused with the same soul as the culture fueling it. They got there only by almost going broke and trying to fix a wreck of a Bruce Willis game first.

1. Bruce Willis’s Deck

Developer Neversoft was on the brink of closure in 1998. Activision, a storied but at the time faded publisher founded by Atari developers in the 1980s, had to finally finish a disintegrating project called Apocalypse, a game in which Bruce Willis would follow you around, helping you blow up bad guys and shouting inane action movie quips. When the two companies teamed up, they retrofitted one of Neversoft’s unfinished projects into a new version of Apocalypse, which also became the testing ground for an ambitious skateboarding game. Before Tony Hawk, there was John McClane’s Pro Skater.

Mick West (Neversoft cofounder, lead programmer of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater): We ran out of money working on a game called Big Guns for Sony. They kept changing what the game was and eventually canceled. Activision was a half-hour drive away. Turned out that they needed somebody to finish off Apocalypse.

David Stohl (producer of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, currently EVP, head of Call of Duty development at Activision): I was brought in to help finish Apocalypse. It was an ambitious project. Bruce Willis was your buddy. I ended up meeting [Neversoft cofounder] Joel Jewett in late ’97 just randomly. And that’s where it started.

Scott Pease (creative executive on Apocalypse, producer of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater): Activision had this deal with Bruce Willis. It had to get done. Neversoft picked up those pieces and just jammed together a game in nine months, and that was awesome.

West: We showed them our prototype of Big Guns and it was just like, “Oh, we’ll just bolt Bruce Willis’s appearance onto this. We’ll have a fun game!” We pitched that we could do it by Christmas. Based on that they considered us for additional projects, one of which was Tony Hawk.

Stohl: Tony Hawk was a name then, but we weren’t into Tony Hawk yet. We were just looking at what was happening in pop culture. There was a stand-up arcade machine across the street from Neversoft called Top Skater. It was in a bowling alley and we’d all go across the street and play that.

Pease: I grew up skateboarding. I had the world’s worst half-pipe in my backyard that we built completely wrong, like everyone who tries to build a half-pipe. I grew up playing 720, California Games, Skate or Die; those were in my blood. To me it was a no-brainer.

West: We took Apocalypse and turned it into a skateboarding game. We took Bruce Willis, stuck him on a skateboard, and just had him skating around rooftops.

Silvio Porretta (lead artist on Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater): Scott Pease, he’s the one who really nailed the gameplay. There’s something about him, the way he designs mechanics in a game that’s just flawless and very addictive.

Pease: I quit Activision to go work at Neversoft full time on the game because it was my baby. My welcome-to-Neversoft moment: I’m sure you’ve heard the first incarnation of Neversoft described as a “frat house.” Joel would bring his dog to work. That was Logan, the first dog who would later appear in the Tony Hawk games. One of the first days, Logan walks in the room, looks at me, lifts his leg, and just pisses all down the wall next to me. Just turns around slowly and shuffles out.

Chris Rausch (designer, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater): Nerf bullets flying everywhere. We were all stuffed in, three people in rooms made for one and a half. It was impossible not to be close to your teammates. Joel built a ramp in his backyard and we’d go have these skate parties at his house, and everybody’s just eating shit all over Joel’s backyard. Drinking beers, trying to figure out what this is we’re trying to capture on screen.

Porretta: Some of the designers were doing crazy shit. “Oh, let’s put a skater up here and he’s smoking weed. He’s getting high and then he starts to skate like crazy fucking shit!” There was no logic. We were just a bunch of kids having fun. Mick was the most professional and responsible person in the room. It’s kind of incredible that we were able to put this game together.

Rausch: Mick was the brains. Everything you wanted to get to work he could figure out a way to do it. He’d hacked up a way to make GameShark attachments work as dev kits. So we’re working on retail PlayStations with these GameSharks to build and pass the game through.

West: The trick system evolved over time. In May 1998 we started the prototype and we didn’t actually get the way the scoring worked until November. A long time thrashing around trying to figure out what’s good.

Pease: We never wanted you to accidentally do something you didn’t want to do. Even if that was cool. We wanted it to do exactly what you were telling it to do. When you actually physically push that button and then you get snapped into that rail, it feels like you’re doing something, versus the game kind of playing itself.

West: Just making the skaters roll over the ground is straightforward. But what happens when you go off the half-pipe? You want to make that realistic, but it needed to be fun. This one thing, the jumping in the half-pipe, was a pivotal moment when we got it. That set the whole tone of the game in that just simply skating by itself was fun.

Pease: This meeting’s burned in my mind. Silvio was drawing on the whiteboard, brainstorming cool levels, sort of a live session to come up with themes that we could build around, sketching like a madman. It’s going to have a courtyard, picnic tables, and they’re going to have big stair sets and this and that. Then we had to go and build them.

Porretta: The sketches: That was cool! Mick was doing rough drawings of the level. I redid all the levels on paper. We didn’t have an iPhone to take photos or anything.

Porretta: I looked at a lot of magazines and that’s what gave me the idea of the user interface and the color scheme. Whatever I create, I like to put a lot of layers and I like very gritty stuff. My approach with Tony Hawk was more street than competition. Going up and down the ramp is completely boring, but on the street doing tricks on rails and steps, that’s cool to me. At the time I was really into two brands: Stussy and Adidas. Adidas isn’t a skate brand but I really wanted to implement it somehow. In one of the title screens of Tony Hawk, I implemented three vertical yellow stripes that are a reference to Adidas.

West: We really wanted to do real skate culture. The gameplay itself isn’t realistic, grinding along power lines and things like that. But the actual culture aspect of all the graphics, all the graffiti, the decks, the deck art, the fact that we had real skaters in, that stuff we took directly from actual culture.

2. The Road to the 900

Neversoft proved with a punchy prototype cobbled together out of the bones of a mediocre action game that its team could deliver a truly special skateboarding game. Activision, however, needed a big name to sell the game. Both the developer and the publisher knew that Tony Hawk would be a perfect fit if they could get him. But Hawk was already talking with the company behind Grand Theft Auto about another boarding game …

Tony Hawk: In ’98, I was enjoying a resurgence with my career because suddenly skating was back in the limelight with the advent of the X Games and street skating. Skateboarding was valid. It just felt much more robust than skating in the ’80s. It was more about the rebellious attitude and the graphics, and no one was really that focused on the physical activity of skating. But people were drawn to the unorthodox approach and daredevil aspects.

Pease: Marketing was adamant that we needed to have a license. Could be Thrasher, could be TransWorld, could be a skater. Everyone knew, just in the gut, that Tony would be the guy if we could get him to do it.

Hawk: Doing the game, the finances were not motivating me. I grew up playing video games in the ’80s. So for me it was a passion project. I got approached by Rockstar Games and they were working on a skate game. I saw a short glimpse of what they were working on and I was close to working with them. But something about it didn’t feel as intuitive as I had hoped. They were very focused on the hardcore skate crowd. Right around that time when I was getting close to signing a deal with them, Activision called.

Pease: So they set up a meeting. We have that demo ready to go and then I had a trick list. Tony shows up and he’s like in cargo pants and a tee shirt, total skater garb. They walk him into the boardroom and it’s just everybody in suits. The first thing they hit him with is the full-on PowerPoint presentation. “Skateboarding is growing at a phenomenal rate!” They’re going through revenue and projections and it just goes on and on and on. I’m looking at Tony across the table and I just see him sinking in his chair like, “Oh god …” Then finally at the very end of the meeting I get to put the trick list in his hand and he’s like, “Oh, this is cool. Yeah! I got some ideas for the rest.” He’s starting to get it. Then we wheel in the old-school TV cart with a dev PlayStation and we booted up. Tony got to sit there and play that demo live. He’s totally into it.

Hawk: They presented me with their engine that did have Bruce Willis as a character and just a few basic tricks. I think it had an ollie and a kickflip; you could do 180s. Something about it felt right and I can’t explain it. I just knew that this was more fun to play, and with my experience, my resources, I could make this something that represented skating authentically. There wasn’t a bidding war—I signed off with them almost immediately.

Pease: We didn’t hear anything for two months! It was this whole negotiation.

Hawk: There were so many subtleties to go over, the way that tricks were triggered and the way they looked. I would say this needs to flip faster, this needs to look more pointed like a melon grab. Little subtleties like that to reflect current skating.

Pease: Motion capture was mostly a marketing thing. “We need the footage of Tony in the suit to say there’s mocap to make the whole story more interesting!” We didn’t need the mocap. But we went ahead and did the shoot and put Tony through the paces. He busted his ass off giving us all kinds of different tricks. He bailed on those ping-pong balls! It was fantastic to look at it on the computer and use it for reference, but it was way too late for us to get that data into that game.

Stohl: It’s not genius for me to say, “Hey, we should have Tony Hawk in our game.” He was the biggest name that I grew up with in skating. But Tony was driving, saying we need Elissa Steamer, Kareem Campbell, Bob Burnquist, Andrew Reynolds, all these people that we got for the game.

Hawk: The roster came from me. That first crew represented the different styles of skating, the guys who were really pushing the limits and to a certain extent the diversity. Looking back, obviously it was super skewed. There’s only one girl. But at the same time, that was the state of skateboarding—the ratio of male to female was so offset. Elissa was truly the best choice in terms of the best street skater. Even with Kareem representing African Americans … that ratio is way more equal in skating now. At the time it wasn’t, and a lot of people have told me that that’s what got them into skating. They saw Kareem in the game and they were like, “Oh, it’s not just a white-boy sport.” I actually heard it from Pharrell Williams. He was telling me about growing up in Virginia, being a skater, and how it was just not cool in his region and his crew. He said after the video game came out, it was just normalized.

3. Video Games’ Greatest Mixtape

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater was coming together, a feat of both technical grace and serendipity not unlike the best skate tricks. Best of all, it was turning out to be as legitimately cool as the culture it captured. Every legendary skate video needed a killer soundtrack, though. Everyone on the team started naming the perfect tunes for the game: skate staples like Dead Kennedys’ “Police Truck,” brutal underground cuts like Unsane’s “Committed,” and even Buzzbin-ready hits like Goldfinger’s “Superman.”

Stohl: Tony was already starting to cross over, but we also had these kind of authentic street and speed skaters. It was better that we had that and that we had the music that was so relevant to skating.

Rausch: My era in skateboarding was mid-’80s, when it was all like skate punk. The Adolescents and Dead Kennedys. I started bringing in mixtapes, we started pulling stuff from Napster, even—“These are the kind of bands we want to go get.” And at the time licensed music in games wasn’t really like that.

Les Claypool (cofounder of Primus): [Guitarist] Larry LaLonde was our big skater. Primus shows were notorious for being very energetic, lots of moshing and stage diving, and I think it just appealed to that aggressive and somewhat rebellious sense of the skate community. We had a lot of friends that were skaters, so whenever any of these opportunities to be a part any of that stuff, we would just let them use the stuff, because we thought it was a cool association to have our music be a part of these things. It was always entertaining to hear us jangling away behind these guys as they’re bouncing off of walls and railings and whatnot.

Pease: The way I remember it was like, let’s just let everybody contribute what you think would be great tracks. When Tony got wind of it he contributed as well. They had to be good tracks to skate to, right?

Rausch: The soundtrack was going to be a part of the personality. I had been working with a guy named Jeff Gordon and he was making music videos, working with groups like Goldfinger at the time, but also all these other kinds of local up-and-comers. And so I started throwing those bands in there too. REO Speedealer was one. At the time they were getting sued by, obviously, REO Speedwagon. So the band you got on the Tony Hawk soundtrack was Speedealer because, lo and behold, REO Speedealer wasn’t going to fly.

Porretta: My ex-wife was working with the manager of Slayer at the time. She got Suicidal Tendencies to put music in the game. We looked at what was cool because for us it was important to be cool before anything.

Claypool: You hear a sound or a song and it brings you back to a time in your life. Hopefully it’s a positive time of your life, but it’s the soundtrack to your existence on the planet. These things, these tunes, these video games, the Tony Hawk game. I’ve had so many people over the years comment to me about how they had “Jerry Was a Race Car Driver” driven into their brain playing Tony Hawk Pro Skater. That’s an amazing thing.

4. The Game

Tony Hawk and Neversoft thought they’d made something magical, but it wasn’t until people outside the creative circle started playing the game that they realized what a monster they had on their hands. By mid-summer 1999, a single-level demo of the game was already transfixing actual pro skaters. It became “The Game” to the whole community. When the full game came out, it shredded Activision’s sales expectations and grew into a cultural sensation.

Hawk: Right before the release I had pirated a few copies of the beta for some friends who are into video games but also skated. They just started calling it “The Game.” That’s what it became known as in the skate community. “Have you played The Game? Have you seen The Game?!” Then even closer to release Activision offered me a buyout of future royalties, basically like if I wanted cash right now. And I didn’t. I wasn’t that savvy in business. I didn’t really know. But at the same time I was doing pretty well. I told them to their face, I don’t need the money right now. I’m happy to see what happens with this and let it ride.

Stohl: We were at the Action Sports Retailers show and I was walking around the floor approaching all the street skater people Tony and I had agreed to reach out to. You could just tell. Every game person will tell you once you put your game in somebody’s hands for the first time and let them just do whatever it’s so cringey. So hard. But when we got to show the game at the Action Sports Retailers show, it was hugely successful and popular and everyone thought it was really fun. Everybody was completely surprised. It wasn’t what they thought. We were like, “We need to get this into people’s hands. We need to show them this.”

Ralph D’Amato (associate producer on Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater): I was tasked with getting focus testers. I did things like putting up flyers at high schools, which would probably get you arrested today.

Rausch: Joel would go out at night to skate parks. He would wheel a TV over to a bunch of kids in the parking lot: Play this, check it out, and tell me what you think. They would go nuts. The TV didn’t survive. He dumped it on the pavement. But everybody we would give it to had the same kind of reaction. Sony wanted to put it on their Jam Pack, this demo disc they were putting in their magazines. That exploded. Even on bulletin boards, just the fledgling internet: The only thing people were talking about was the Tony Hawk demo.

D’Amato: It was wave after wave of kid that didn’t want to leave. They wanted to keep playing the game. It was also a little bit scary because we weren’t getting much in the way of criticism.

Stohl: When we started we didn’t have huge expectations. You don’t plan for something to be Pro Skater from a performance point of view. You would never do that in business. It’s irresponsible. We thought we would do pretty well. I’ve watched a million curves over the years of launch and unit sales. You often see a big uptake at launch from preorders and stuff like that. And then it comes off a bit and then it maybe builds in the holiday. But that game never dropped. It never slowed. So it launched well, but it kept growing. It just kept selling and selling.

Mat Piscatella (executive director, games, The NPD Group): Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater is a wild game from a sales perspective. It started out a bit slow. It was the no. 31 best-selling game of 1999, selling right around 800,000 units. It was outsold that year by games like Wheel of Fortune, Ready 2 Rumble Boxing, and A Bug’s Life. However, it sold over 5 million units lifetime, and was the second-highest-selling game among 1999 releases over time, second only to Pokemon Yellow. And, of course, it created one of the biggest franchises in video game history.

Pease: I was there in the beginning on the Activision side. I saw that we had to sell 250,000 units. If we do that, we’ll make our money back, we’ll make Activision a profit, and we’ll probably get to make Tony Hawk 2. All I wanted to do was for this to be successful enough so that we can make the next one. Because it was so fun to make. Then it just kept growing. I did not foresee that happening at all. And obviously some of that was out of our control. It was like a whole bunch of different forces coming together in this magic way. Tony hitting the 900 at the X Games. Holy shit.

Hawk: We had no intention of putting 900s in the game before that. You could spin in the air in the game and it would kill your rotations and you can make that into a 900, but that wasn’t the signature move itself.

Simeon Bartholomew (cofounder of Birdman or the Unexpected Virtue of a Tony Hawk Pro Skater Cover Band, which exclusively plays music from the game): I played it at a friend’s place first. I never had a PlayStation, I was a Nintendo kid. His name was Tony and I would always go to his house every morning and we would play it before school. I would always tell my mom that we had extra classes on Friday or whatever just so I could have the excuse to leave early. For me was just the ultimate, one of the very first games in my childhood that was free. There’s no boundaries. You can go wherever you want and do whatever you want. The tricks are up to you. The points are up to you, the combos that you want to do to collect all the things, the part that you choose is up to you. I was a bit physically disabled and I couldn’t ride skateboards. But [the game] just had this ability to let me do whatever I want.

Josh Tsui (filmmaker, cofounder of Robomodo, the studio behind Tony Hawk’s Ride): One of the things about those early Tony Hawk games that really resonated with me, besides just the aesthetics of it, was that they were very fast-paced. They’re very similar to arcade games. I’m an arcade rat at heart. It showed that you can make games for a home console that are larger in scope but can still be fast-paced. It doesn’t have to have a 40-hour story. It had a great pickup-and-play attitude toward it.

Bartholomew: Three months after forming the band, we were headlining this small stage at this festival. The response went far beyond what I thought we were going to achieve. I thought we were going to be the midday dance. The gimmick band that’s funny. But no, here we were closing a small stage and we have like 600, 800 people in front of us just like erupting, almost caving in the dance floor. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater was kind of like having the older brothers that I never had to curate music taste. The moment I got into Tony Hawk, I was just like, “Oh my God, I love punk music and I love everything here.”

5. “I Never Thought That Would Be Possible”

Looking back on that first game, the people responsible for Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater are wistful and still dumbfounded, delightedly so, at how much people adored their work. While its creators are grateful for the game’s legacy, they also miss the freedom they had to create so freely. And Tony Hawk himself remains astounded by how the world embraced skating in its wake.

West: We pioneered certain types of gameplay—the tricks, in particular, and tying in real-world culture into a game was something new. I think because it was such a fun, popular game, it just pushed things along a big step rather than a revolution.

Stohl: I’ve worked at seven different versions of Activision over 24 years. I’ve watched the company evolve, the industry evolve, the game content evolve, the players evolve. Back then it was like, “OK, let’s make the PlayStation version for North America. OK, we got that done.” Then once we were launched, we were done. You couldn’t even update on the console back then. There was no patching. Making a game was so different then. It was so nice.

Porretta: The industry has changed so much. It’s not creative anymore. Everything is controlled. When I started, I was doing everything in game development, from design to animations to sketches. Today everyone has a specific role and you cannot deviate from that role. Games now are all about making money.

Pease: As you go through your career you don’t even realize how awesome those moments were back then. To have a team like that where everybody’s into it, everybody’s having fun, everyone’s pulling in the same direction—you’re just getting to make the thing that you want to make. It’s super rare. I don’t think anybody realized it at the time.

Rausch: It may very well be the most important thing I ever do in my whole career. And hopefully that’s gonna last a really long time. I started a studio, I’ve done all these other things. I’ve worked on big license titles and big games, but I’ve never been a part of something like that. I’m a huge Star Wars fan. As a kid that was the thing that drove my imagination and I credit it with making me want to go into creative fields. People still constantly say, “Oh my god, I can’t believe you worked on Tony Hawk.” It still seems surreal. We worked with an animator just recently at Nicalis and he was a huge Tony Hawk fan. When he found out, he wanted me to sign something and that’s so foreign to me. It was one of the biggest things he had growing up.

Hawk: Skating is so inclusive and diverse now that you can’t stereotype it. There’s still the hardcore element of skating: people hopping fences, hitting the hand rails, getting tickets from cops, renegade videos, Jackass-style stunts. All that stuff is still there. But it’s equal to the people that are doing it in the designated areas at skate parks and creating content for YouTube and getting big sponsors. Then there’s the Olympic aspect. There are people training to skate for the Olympics. All of those coexist. You can’t just define skating in one certain way anymore.

Things changed in the sense that there was a fan base for skating that didn’t ride skateboards themselves. My name recognition skyrocketed. I was starting to get recognized everywhere I went. My name became synonymous with something other than myself, which was weird. Skating became something that kids chose to do as easily as they chose to play baseball or basketball. More facilities were available and embraced by city councils and by parents. That was the big shift, really. A whole new generation was starting to skate and understood all of its nuances. I never imagined that growing up that I could talk to someone who doesn’t skate and they’d understand what a kickflip is like. I never thought that would be possible.

These interviews have been condensed and edited for clarity.

Anthony John Agnello is a writer and editor living in Ithaca, New York, who covers video games, human beings, and climate change. His work has appeared in The A.V. Club, Engadget, and other publications.