Skateboarding - A Memoir

It all started in a Blockbuster video. For those of you under 30, that was a place you could go to rent movies and games. Kind of like if there was a Netflix store that had tapes and discs but you had to return them after 3 days. So now that I feel a million years old, let's continue.

I was hanging out with my friend Chris Blair. His parents would rent us two videogames for our sleepover, a true decadence. I decided we should rent Star Wars: Masters of Teras Kasi, an ill-advised star wars fighting game. (I wasn't always a bright and discerning child.) Chris looked over the available wares and settled on "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater".

I was dumbfounded. I was sure this was a horrible misallocation of resources. What would you even do in a skateboarding game? Just roll around? Race? It was beyond me. But I could see Chris was dead set on it and I was a guest after all. I don't remember how much time we spent playing Masters of Teras Kasi. I'm not entirely sure we did play Masters of Teras Kasi. What I know is that I fell in love with skateboarding very quickly after that.

Burgeoning Skater

There have been a pretty surprising number of skateboarding games that came out since the formative THPS in 1999 and I've played most of them. But I also wound up skateboarding for many years. Skateboarding was an obsession through high school and college. I watched dozens of skateboarding videos, I had subscriptions to Transworld and The Skateboard Mag, and I skated with friends as much as I could. It was the first physical thing I remember doing without caring if I was any good. At town con, Nate told me I should write about it so here we are.

I was hooked on THPS almost immediately. The gameplay was addictive but I think the soundtrack and videos of the different skaters made a bigger impact on me. I truly hadn't realized that you could perform tricks while skating and I was struck by how aesthetically oriented everything about skating was. It was just cool.

I quickly had my own copy of THPS but I think it wasn't until THPS 2 came out and was somehow, thanks to manuals letting you extend combos, even more fun that I admitted that I wanted my own board. I know I got an Alien Workshop board first, just because I liked the board graphics.

It took me a while to learn to ollie. I spent most of my time skating the roads and driveways around our neighborhood and there wasn't a park nearby that I remember. For years, on Sundays as soon as youth group let out, I would go to the Taco Bell near the church with friends and skate a small 3 stair by the drive-through. It was great.

Fully Committed

My first videos were Transworld's Feedback and Alien Workshop's Photosynthesis. To this day those are favorites of mine, especially Photosynthesis. I could go on about photosynthesis for ages. The filming, the skating, the soundtrack. All of a sudden, I was as into the culture as I was the videogames. I had favorite skaters and board companies and video parts.

There were a handful of other skateboarding games that came out in the PS1 era. Grind Session was decent to my recollection. But THPS 2 took the bulk of my time until I discovered Thrasher: Skate and Destroy, amusingly published by Rockstar Games before the GTA era. Thrasher was the first game I played that was more "skate sim" than arcade-style rack up the points skating. I spent a lot of hours on Thrasher. I liked when I had to work to land realistic tricks at a real world spot which could be a bit awkward to pull off in THPS 2. In fact, I remember a period when I was reducing my stats in THPS 2 to make it easier to skate in a style like the videos I was watching rather than rack up a high score.

A ton of other iconic videos came out in this era. Es footwear's Menikmati made a huge impact and is also in my all time top 5. Aside from legendary video parts from Arto Saari, Rodrigo Texeira, and Eric Koston, it also introduced me to one of my favorite electronic musicians, Amon Tobin. What a blessing.

Flip Skateboards' Sorry came along two years later and shook everything up. I couldn't believe Bastien Salabanzi's double part. He came out of nowhere and was throwing out jaw-dropping tricks left and right with grace and style. Arto and Mark Appleyard were amazing too, of course. I rinsed the tape enough that David Bowie's Rock n Roll Suicide still makes me think of Arto's part.

It feels like only moments later that Girl's Yeah, Right released in 2003. That video still feels like a high water mark for the entire era in terms of skating, soundtrack, and production. It was what happened when a triple AAA lineup spent 2 years saving up their best footage, got celebrity cameos, filmed genuinely entertaining skits with special effects that made boards and ramps invisible, and so on.

During this time, skateboarding games got worse from my perspective. THPS 3 + 4 came out and they added reverts so that you were able to continue your combos after doing vert tricks. From a gameplay perspective, I had been pretty disincentivized to skate vert previously. Since I couldn't continue the combo after a vert trick, it wasn't a good route to a high score. Thanks to the jump to the PS2 the graphics also improved a fair bit.

But the level design was feeling pretty uninspired and any connection to skateboarding as it actually happened was feeling increasingly tenuous. I played THPS 4 for a little while but went back to Thrasher pretty quickly.

College Years

Habitat's Mosaic came out not long before I went to Oglethorpe and competes with Photosynthesis for my favorite video of all time. AWS and Habitat were sister companies so this makes a good amount of sense. There's a huge overlap in style and approach. The soundtrack and editing are perfect. Some skaters just look great without even doing tricks. They could be pushing around hopping curbs and doing an occasional 180. AWS + Habitat videos capture that for me.

I wound up going to Oglethorpe university and tearing a ligament in my (I think) left ankle the night before classes started. I was ollieing a long five set on the upper quad and kicked the board away midair one attempt. Unfortunately, I rolled my ankle very badly catching the last stair as I came down. Limping to math class in moccasins the first day because I had a giant swollen purple thing where my ankle should be is pretty funny in retrospect.

Oglethorpe was in many ways some of the happiest years of my life. I was finally on my own. I had constant friends or companions around. But critically, it was such a better place to skate than my neighborhood growing up or the church. I played skateboarding games much less. College was the era of smash bros with roommates (and later tournaments). But I was skating the quad every day and grinning like an idiot. I was probably in the best shape of my life.

Modern Era

A few years later, I moved out of the dorms to live with friends and transferred to SPSU to study Computer Science. I was briefly in a house in 2008-2009 and working full time after I found out about dad's cancer. There was precious little skating but I was lucky to discover EA's Skate for the PS3 which is tied with the follow-up Skate 2 as my favorite skateboarding game of all time.

The Skate series is a skate sim done right. It paired the fantastic graphics the PS3 made possible with a novel control scheme where the analog sticks represented your feet as a skater. Rather than practicing button combos to learn tricks, you were practicing leg movements.

It had an EA-level budget and participation from the biggest board companies and pros that were active when it was made to boot. The biggest knock I can give it is that it didn't run at a silky smooth 60fps on PS3 but for the best skateboarding game of all time I could give a damn.

There's been a "Skate 4" in development for 4 or 5 years now but from my perspective they could just re-release or remaster the existing games for modern systems and I'd throw a pile of money at them.

Anyway, by 2010 I was living in an apartment complex with my friend Ben. I was back in school and staring at code as long as I could stand it and then going and practicing tricks in the parking lot until my brain cooled off and I'd worked through any latent anxiety about my future. Whenever Burke was in town we would go spend an afternoon at Brookrun skatepark and then get sushi. Those were the days.

Focusing on building a life

The amount I skated dropped drastically in 2011. Burke and I were living together in an apartment but I'd just started my first job as a working developer. Within 12 months, Burke moved up to Indiana for a job and the era of trips to the skatepark ended. Norma and I started dating not long after that in 2013. There was one time I convinced a former Engineering Manager, Jason Bruce, to go skate at Brookrun with me though. That was great fun. I got some video too. But that was more or less the end of my heavy skateboarding era. It was a nice 12 year run.

There are some current gen skating games: Skater XL and Session and a THPS remaster. Session is my favorite of the bunch, a skate sim with significant real world spots and lore from NYC, SF, and Philly. Playing those games is like doodling in a notebook for me. I can turn my brain off and just doodle but it wastes time in a way that I'm not always happy with.

I've skated a little in the last two years in the parking lot across the street. Enough to make sure I can still kickflip even if it takes a minute. Burke and I even managed to skate together a bit over the holidays while he was in town from Michigan. But every now and then I daydream about cruising around the Oglethorpe campus and playing games of skate with Burke. Maybe I'll rewatch Mosaic later.