Tony Hawk is still making you see the world like a skater

Washington Post

2 days ago

After becoming the world's most recognizable athlete for his chosen sport, Anthony Frank 'Tony' Hawk is now a 57-year-old grandfather. It's a life that's vastly exceeded any expectations he ever had.
Named at birth like a superhero, Tony Hawk became the face of skateboarding in no small part due to Activision's blockbuster 'Tony Hawk's Pro Skater' series, which just released remakes of its third and fourth games, developed by Iron Galaxy. Hawk's amiable presence is felt across his fan interactions and interviews, proving it's still possible in 2025 to hold all that clout and still be down to earth. Hawk tells The Post in an interview that it's because nothing, including skateboarding becoming a respected, international sport, was ever expected.
'There's just no way I would've dreamt any of this,' Hawk says. 'You couldn't be rich or famous as a skateboarder when I first started. No one had been.'
It's been a long road to respectability for the once-maligned sport, invented in the 1940s and '50s by bored Southern California surfers looking for more reasons to be on a board. Sidelined and dismissed for decades as idle activity for loitering teens and misfits, skateboarding has elevated to the Olympic Games. Hawk and some of his peer skating legends attribute much of that rise in acceptance to the 1999 game developed by the now-defunct Neversoft Entertainment, 'Tony Hawk's Pro Skater.'
'Tony is the revolution, he took us to a whole other level,' said Kareem Campbell, the Harlem-born 51-year-old often called the godfather of smooth street style and inventor of the 'Ghetto Bird' trick. 'The game helped pro skating be in the Olympics right now. He became a household name. Every skater on the game became a household name. It captures all the different elements of skateboarding.'
The game became a top seller on Sony PlayStation in 1999, and its sequel next year was even bigger. It revolutionized the extreme sports genre in video games by wearing its video game inspirations on its sleeve.
Scott Pease, former Neversoft studio development director, said the ragtag team of developers looked to the early pioneers of 3D video games to inspire their own groundbreaking work. 'The influences are definitely '[Super] Mario 64,' and even to a certain extent, 'Diddy Kong Racing,'' Pease said, giggling to himself. 'If you look at the structure of 'Tony Hawk 1' with the secret tapes and the goals, we kinda lifted a lot of that from 'Diddy Kong Racing,'' whose collectible balloons let players unlock more of the game.
The game also mimicked racing games, propelling skaters forward automatically. Level designs used real-life skate spots like schools and abandoned warehouses, all littered with rails and ledges for grinding and ramps for vertical tricks.
'A lot of that comes from our lead programmer and technical director Mick West and him trying to understand how people interacted with their controller,' Pease said. Game designers were still figuring out how to make 3D gameplay feel natural. 'He understood innately that the camera and your responsiveness were completely connected, and how your view is completely determined by that 3D camera. Mick invented the camera movement where you jump off the vert ramp and the camera would swing around and look down to see where you were going to land. Without that, there's no game.'
As a child of the coin-munching arcades of the 1980s, Hawk grew up on video games. He had played every skateboarding game ever made, but for years he was looking for the perfect formula. Hawk said he was shopping around various game publishers pitching a skating game, and Activision caught wind and invited him to Neversoft. In 1998, Neversoft made a game starring Bruce Willis called 'Apocalypse.' It didn't sell well, but the team used the same 3D technology to power a prototype of their hypothetical skating game. Sans a pro skater, they used Willis.
'The first build I ever saw of the game was seeing Bruce Willis on a skateboard,' Hawk said. 'I was able to control him, do kick-flips and do grabs and spins, and I thought, 'This is the coolest thing I've ever been able to play.''
'Tony Hawk's Pro Skater' became the rare video game experience that can alter one's perception of the world. Like 'Tetris' induced its players to perceive the world built with blocks of four tiles, 'THPS' made its players think like a skater, seeing 'lines' of opportunity across the framework of civilization.
'Especially in the first few years, people who never skated suddenly understood skate culture, skate language, and they would see landscapes as skateable places in the real world,' Hawk said. 'That's when I saw a big shift.'
It was normalizing skating culture right at the turn of the millennium, as the video games industry expanded to new audiences with the introduction of PlayStation and Microsoft Xbox.
Brazil-born Bob Burnquist, winner of 30 medals at the X Games, was in the first class of pro skaters of the series, handpicked by Hawk. Now 48, Burnquist grew up in Rio de Janeiro, far away from the skating hotbed of Southern California. He admired Hawk from afar as a teen.
'I got a glimpse of Tony for the first time on video. Friends would travel to the U.S. and come home with a VHS tape, and that's how we got what was happening. Right when I started, Tony in 1989 went down to Brazil. My dad couldn't take me, but it just put a mark on Brazil.'
Burnquist saw the spread of anti-skateboarding legislation across various jurisdictions, including Brazil. It was important for him to see that it was growing in popularity despite these bans. The game was a piercing bullet through the consciousness of a new generation, millennials who grew into midlife today.
'After all these years, you have the city of Rio you can choose [in the game] with all these different characters, and seeing Brazil there? It's an accomplishment for Brazilian skateboarding,' Burnquist said. 'To be included as a Brazilian, it showed we are a part of the culture.'
Skating culture was not immune to the changes brought upon by the internet. People of Hawk's generation discovered new tricks and athletes through the VHS tapes and magazines like Thrasher. Hawk said social media has changed the dynamics of discovery.
'When we first started this game, one of the only ways to be known as a skater was to compete, and if you weren't competing, you'd better be producing a lot of video, and you hoped to be featured in a skate video,' Hawk said. 'Nowadays you can be your own brand, producing content daily and sharing it whenever. Now the field is wider and more open, but you have to keep producing, have to keep getting better at it. You can't just rest on your accolades, that's the one thing that's been the same throughout the years.'
Hawk takes credit for igniting the current remakes. He approached Activision to use the intellectual property for a concert series, and suggested the series be revived somehow for its 20th anniversary. For the first two games, Activision tapped an internal studio that eventually got absorbed into its sizable operation to create the titanic 'Call of Duty' series. For the remake 'Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4,' released July 11, Iron Galaxy was selected.
Despite carrying the title of games from the early 2000s, the studio considers the latest release a new project, said game director Kurt Tillmanns. This includes new levels made just for this release.
'We were able to go in and make brand new levels and unlock our creativity, do some wacky things like pinball and make this skater's paradise of a shut-down water park,' Tillmanns said.
The game also largely overhauls its soundtrack. Hawk takes credit for that decision, in the spirit of how the original game introduced players to new bands and music genres. (The 'Tony Hawk' and 'Grand Theft Auto' games are often credited with expanding the use of licensed popular music in the medium.)
Besides, listening to old songs can be like putting too fine a mark on the past. The most iconic song from the games is Goldfinger's 'Superman,' with a chorus that yells 'Growing older all the time.'
Hawk is now grandfather to Ronin Walker Cobain Hawk, as his son Riley (now featured in the updated games) married rock legend Kurt Cobain's daughter, Frances Bean. The birth announcement resulted in an explosion of memes suggesting the coolest human being might've been born.
'Being a grandparent is exactly all the fun that grandparents gush over, and the reason they get excited when they know their grandchild's coming. That's how my wife and I feel exactly,' Hawk said. 'The fact that Ronin has this legacy behind him, I don't want him to feel like he has to live up to anything in that respect. I just want him to find what he really enjoys, to follow his passion. I just want him to have fun, and I don't want him to feel like an outsider or that people are looking at him in a different way.'
Hawk said the family has a group text chat of nothing but photos of the still-infant Ronin, and he had just received them and was looking at them before the interview.
But is grandpa Hawk feeling older all the time?
'Oh my body feels it every time I wake up. I definitely have my go-to skill set, but it's a lot more work than it used to be, and a lot more recovery and progress.'
For Tony Hawk's pro and personal adventures, it's been a life well lived.
'I'm living the dream, the idea that I still get to participate, and then I get to witness skating come to this level, and I can help guide or foster up-and-coming skaters,' Hawk said. 'It's between that and helping to develop public skate parks, that's the most important and most gratifying work I can do.'