The Music of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater
Every Tony Hawk game, starting with the original, had a carefully curated soundtrack of both classic songs and contemporary tunes, usually oriented towards punk rock. The first Pro Skater only featured ten songs in its soundtrack with a decidedly more punk and thrash orientation compared to its sequel. Punk stalwarts like The Vandals, Dead Kennedys, and Goldfinger are among the standouts. The Pro Skater sequels would not only expand upon the number of tracks available in their soundtracks but also feature a broader variety of genres while retaining its punk rock roots.
By 2000’s Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2, the soundtrack expanded to include nu-metal acts like Papa Roach, hip-hop groups like Naughty by Nature, and hard rock bands including Rage Against the Machine and Powerman 5000. The Pro Skater soundtracks immediately became a firm part of the games’ identity, from Goldfinger’s “Superman” becoming the series’ unofficial anthem to the rousing open notes of Rage Against the Machine’s “Testify” greeting players as Pro Skater 2 booted up. Tony Hawk observed how song choices in underground skating videos and skate parks made a huge deal in how skaters and the community were perceived. This attention to detail carried over to the Pro Skater soundtracks.
The Pro Skater developers recalled that the first game’s limited budget and recognition helped them secure bands that were less interested in working with larger projects and studios. This helped lend to the series’ sense of authenticity and street cred among skateboarding communities and introduce newcomers to that underground scene. By the later sequels, Hawk recalls bigger bands approaching him to potentially secure a spot on game soundtracks, some of which Hawk declined as they didn’t match the ethos of the games and the greater skating community.
Capturing an Era
Of course, while the soundtrack is a major part of Pro Skater’s continued nostalgia factor, it’s far from the only thing that makes the game series so distinctly representative of its era. The general aesthetic of the Pro Skater games feels so uniquely late ‘90s and early 2000s and something that competing contemporary extreme sports games, and even subsequent Tony Hawk series, failed to distill in their own gameplay experiences. This nostalgia also goes beyond the technical presentation of the Pro Skater games because it remains lovingly intact on modern consoles with the acclaimed 2020 remake, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2.
Joining Tony Hawk was a roster of handpicked popular skaters at the time, ranging from Kareem Campbell to Bucky Lasek, fronting brands that one could find on t-shirts everywhere at the time, like Element or Volcom. Players would track down VHS tapes to help earn points to unlock future levels while the environments they could skate in, from abandoned shopping malls to real-life locations like Venice Beach, felt evocative of the time. Even the games’ unlockable characters, like Darth Maul, Spider-Man, and Jango Fett, all reflected popular movies of the era and fit seamlessly into the main playable roster.
There is something in the spirit of Pro Skater and the skating community that connected with a generation, grounded in just enough verisimilitude to feel like the real world with a rascally spirit that didn’t speak exclusively to jocks like Madden or FIFA, but to gamers of all backgrounds and social strata. The majority of the tunes that were on each soundtrack weren’t necessarily blowing up charts on TRL while the skaters were rarely paradigms of conventional athleticism. The Pro Skater games invited everyone to jump in and play while its attention to detail and authenticity helped reinforce its contemporary qualities transitioning into early 2000s nostalgia.
