Elissa Steamer can remember how before 1999 skateboarding was by video games.
She didn’t play a lot of it, and as a child she was more likely to fire Mike Tyson’s Punch Out or The legend of Zelda When she skipped school. But there was 720Released in Arcades and on the original Nintendo. Likewise there was Surf designs in the city and land: wood and water rageAnother NES game that combined surfing and skating. Skate or that! Was another with 8-bit graphics.
But as Steamer remembers: “None of them really felt like skateboarding … It was all 1980s.”
Sometime in the late nineties, Steamer heard that a company made a video game to Tony Hawk. At the time, steamboat was then a budding professional skateboard that had deals with companies such as Toy Machine and Baker, and had in some of the right-to-VHS skating tires that were popular around that time-in particular 1996s Welcome to HEL where people can see A then 21-year-old steamboat sharpening on benches and picks up kickflips while they have flaggy pants and kick a few fresh white adidas like a song from Sundays Plays about the grainy images.
One day she noticed that she was hanging around in the garage of colleague -professional skater Jamie Thomas who had an example copy of 1999 Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. Steamboat was a bit fooled with the game on Thomas’s PlayStation and she was blown away by its appearance and feeling. Thomas then told her: “I think they will also reach you.”
A few days later, Steamer was on the phone with the makers of the game, Activision and Neversoft, who threw her the idea of being in the game. After he had already played a version of it, steamboat did not hesitate to register. And so she became the first woman to be seen in a Tony Hawk video game.
Now, 26 years later, the impact of that first game is still felt. Countless people from skating in and out have credited to pushing the sport into the consciousness of pop culture and making it more accessible to a wider audience. Books have been written about it, documentaries have been produced and thoughtful essays about its resonance were written down in places such as the New York Times and NPR. Game Informer called it one of the 100 best video games of all time. While both children and adults played graffiti, horse and trick attack, they were exposed to a gnarly soundtrack and the culture around skateboarding. Many of them fell in love with it.
“I mean, at that time skateboarding was quite withheld, and I think that just stimulated a bit of skateboarding in the mainstream,” Steamher recently told SB Nation. “You didn’t have to be able to ride a skateboard to see skateboarding. You could participate in a game that skateboarding depicted in such a great way. It got skateboarding and our names and who we were.
“I think a lot of the skateboard tree of the early 2000s was a bit due to this video game.”
Since the success of the original THPs in 1999, the game has produced 20 extra variations and followers. And steamboat has appeared in a lot, with the newest no exception.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 – The completely re -made from the land versions of followers that were originally released in 2001 and 2002 – fell on 11 July. The remake combines some fans of those classics with modern upgrades, new tricks, additions to the soundtrack, unique parks and playing online.
And there are also more skaters. Long past the days that steamboat was the only playable woman in the game. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 Contains eight female skaters and also Leo Baker, who identifies as transgender and uses them pronouns.
Steamboat, which recently celebrated her 50th birthday, feels like the growing inclusion of women, minorities and LGBTQ+ people from the game have played a major role in exposing skateboarding to more people.
“We have learned that if you see someone like you who do something you want to do, you know you can do it,” says Steamer. “So yes, it has been completely useful for women, transgender, queer people. The game is really included, as the world is and should be. The best of skateboarding is that there are no rules. Only anarchy.”
Nora Vasconcellos was 7 years old when the first THPs came on the shelves of video game stores. She grew up in New England in what she calls ‘Cranberry Bog Land’ where there were many barns but not many paved driveways. Simply put, she was not surrounded by skating culture. Yet Vasconcellos could not shake her interest in skating and consuming through books and magazines that she would get in the library.
Then THPs arrived and she soon played as often as she could in her cousin’s house or on the small TV in her brother’s room.
“I just feel that everything, from the music to literally learning who Elissa Steamer was, was through a video game,” Vasconcellos, now 33, told SB Nation. “It was one of the roads I got to explore skating.”
One of the levels in THPS 3 is called ‘Skater’s Island’. It is also in the latest reissue and is based on a real skate park in Rhode Island that was destroyed in 2004. Vasconcellos never had to skate there despite living relatively close, but must experience it through the game.
“It’s pretty funny, what’s ingrained in your mind,” says Vasconcellos. “I just remember that people told me how sick it was, and then I get it fun, a bit of recovering, via the video game.”
After playing as a steamboat in some of the old video games, Vasconcellos flourished into a professional skater. She won a gold medal at the Vans Park Series World Championships 2017 and signed at Adidas. One of her skateboards is in the Smithsonian, but more social currencies appear in a Tony Hawk video game than the or other milestones she hit in her career.
“There are many people from all over my life who may not be able to understand what it means to get a Thrasher cover, or perhaps not being able to understand a pro -shoe … but they understand, such as:” You are a playable character on Tony Hawk’s pro -Kater, “because that is much of the only interaction of people with skateboarding.”
Vasconcellos and Steamer are two of the eight Badass women who can be seen in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4. The others are Lizzie Armaranto, Leticia Bufoni, Chloe Covell, Margelyn Didal, Rayssa Leal and Airi Nishimura.
For Vasconcellos she seems to believe that if it was not in 1999 in 1999, she might not make her THPS debut in 2025.
“There were not many women who made careers of skateboarding. I think you see how that was blown up … If you are a woman, you didn’t get the larger deals, you got a kind of pieces. So it’s pretty cool to see that full circle aspect now,” says Vasconcellos. “Admittedly, we are not all more houses of the Tony Hawk game, but in the day they did that, and that was a way for these skaters to create wealth and to be themselves. For a girl like me at the time to play and to introduce myself in that space, it’s pretty cool.”
Skateboarding is demonstrably as mainstream as it has ever been and the Tony Hawk video games are a big reason why. In 2028 in Los Angeles, skateboarding appears for the third time at the Olympic Games.
When she picked gold medals on the X games in the mid-2000s, steamboat-the first woman who became pro in skateboarding and the first woman ever admitted to the Skateboardhall of Fame thought that there was a chance that the sport could ever reach the summer games. Now that they have done that, she gets leaning back, looking and viewing all the great young skaters on a path that she has helped.
“I think the future of skating is in good hands,” says Steamer. “I am just happy that the game is back and I am happy that I am involved. It is really great to skateboarding skateboarding, and I think Tony Hawk is incredible.”
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