How Did I Get Here by Tony Hawk, Pat Hawk Read Free Book Online

oversaw production of the game for Activision, said in a recent interview. “We were totally surprised. Neversoft did an awesome job—the magic was theirs. But Tony was more involved as a licensor than anyone I’ve ever seen, before or since.”
    I picked a group of pro skaters to include as characters, largely based on their skills, personalities, and diversity. I felt like our roster represented skateboarding well. Each one got to pick his or her own outfit and special trick, and I was thankful that they all trusted my instinct even if they hadn’t seen the game before agreeing to be included. (In the first couple of releases, each pro got a cut of the royalties, and they made some pretty good money.)
    To get the skaters to look as realistic as possible, we tried to use motion-capture filming. We wore funny suits with iridescent balls attached to pivotal body parts. As we skated, an array of stationary cameras would record every move from about two dozen different angles. A computer would compile the various perspectives and churn out a 3-D rendering. Mocap was still in its infancy, so it didn’t work out exactly as planned. I bailed on one run and my runaway board slammed into a camera. It took them four hours to recalibrate the system.
    The skin-tight “mocap,” or motion capture, suit is as unflattering as it is uncomfortable.
    In the end, the mocap didn’t translate well to what Neversoft had already programmed, and the animators ended up mainly depending on existing skate footage for reference. But they were so good that nobody could tell the difference. By luck, I landed my first 900 just weeks before the game went to final submission, and they managed to animate it using video footage and squeezed it in at the last minute.
    The music was another important aspect. We were already in uncharted territory, so Activision gave us permission to use the music that had been skateboarding’s soundtrack in the late 1970s and early 1980s: punk rock. I was stoked to expose a new crowd to the tunes I’d grown up with, and the first two versions of the game featured bands like the Dead Kennedys, Suicidal Tendencies, The Vandals, Bad Religion, and Rage Against the Machine. We didn’t have to rely on hits or shell out outlandish licensing fees, because the game was all about skateboarding. We were proud of our counterculture pursuit, and these were its anthems.
    Activision released Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater in 1999. By the time it hit the shelves, I was more excited than nervous. I was confident it would be well received because I’d played it so much and had shown it to friends whose opinions I trusted—people who’d tell me the truth if they thought it sucked. Everyone who tested it liked that they could make the riders do actual tricks, that they could roam freely around the various skate landscapes, and that the central goal was to complete original tricks and improve your own performance. Unlike other sports video games available at that time, it wasn’t about beating someone else, or even the machine—although that was an option if you wanted it. You were basically competing with yourself, just like all skaters do every day.
    This is the cover for my very first video game, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater .
    Courtesy of Activision
    I also had confidence that it would find an audience beyond the action-sports world. The graphics were good, the action was good, the music was good—a complete package.
    Looking back, I’m still not sure if I was prescient, or just really, really lucky. More of the latter, probably. Either way, the game was a hit. It won a bunch of industry awards (Action Game of the Year from Electronic Gaming Monthly magazine, PlayStation Game of the Year from CNET’s gamecenter.com, among others).
    Hi Tony:
    My roommate is a very talented film student. Your stupid video game ruined his life. He locked himself in his room for two weeks and