You can still find remnants of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater on PC littered throughout the internet. This is, though, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD that released back in 2012. The arcade-style skateboarding franchise found much of its success on home consoles, but that still didn’t stop it from influencing a generation of skateboarders, including myself, not to mention those who also played video games. Swedish filmmaker Ludvig Gür aims to shed some light on just how a professional skateboarder, Tony Hawk, secured his own video game with a new documentary.
Tony Hawk X Neversoft
To provide some background on the development process, Gür teamed up with former Neversoft producer Ralph D’Amato. For the series’s evolution, D’Amato was present on all titles up until Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 8 back in 2006. This should provide plenty of stories from behind the scenes.
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Neversoft was the development studio responsible for the original Tony Hawk Pro Skater games. The studio would later in its lifespan go on to assist with the arcade music series, Guitar Hero. They eventually would merge with Infinity Ward in 2014. The studio was recognizable for its mascot/branding, a giant eyeball that would crawl on screen in some form during boot sequences. It’s the same eyeball the studio set ablaze when the merger became official.
Let’s take a trip in the way back machine
I do find it almost serendipitous that I stumbled across an interview with Tony Hawk (see below) some weeks back. The interview was conducted by The Nine Club with Chris Roberts. On the show, Tony Hawk revealed that, during the initial launch of the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater franchise, he received a check for $4 million. For most people, that is a significant amount of scratch. But when you take a step back and look at the current gaming landscape, things might appear differently. Even adjusting for inflation puts it at around $5.8 million, which is again a lot of money, but not what you might expect from a skateboarding game with your name on it that managed to impact generations of skaters and gamers.
The documentary, Pretending I’m a Superman, will premiere at the Mammoth Lakes Film Festival in Mammoth Lakes on February 29. The documentary is named after one of the iconic tracks from the game, “Superman,” as performed by the band, Goldfinger.
