Turn on the radio, and the number one hit was Mambo No.
You had to go looking for a band like Dead Kennedys.
That September though,Tony Hawks Pro Skaterwas released, and changed themusical landscape.
Activision; Neversoft
Twenty-five years later, the soundtrack, and game playthrough feel as relevant and timely as ever.
The stars aligned at the perfect time for the game to be released.
I was like, Oh man, I would kill to work on a skateboarding game.
Neversoft was all for it.
I became involved with helping get Tony on board with the project and get it off the ground.
They had an engine and animations that could do some tricks.
Pease:A lot of guys on the team had dabbled with skateboarding in their youth myself included.
Joel Jewett, the founder of Neversoft, grew up skating in the 1970s.
We werent currently skaters though.
We were video game developers.
Hawk:I think wemadeskaters out of Neversoft.
Okay, sure, for real, they didnt know much about [skating].
They completely immersed themselves in skating and skate culture though.
They had a kickflip challenge after the first game was released among the staff.
Pease:Everybody went out and got a skateboard and tried to get into it.
We were watching skate videos at lunch every single day.
So the first time I played it, it was as Bruce Willis.
Pease:Music is such a huge part of skate culture.
If you watch any of the skate videos, the music choice is huge.
Guys make their whole careers around this persona and the music they cut their videos to.
We wanted to reflect that in the game.
We wanted our game to feel like a skate video come to life in a lot of ways.
Neversoft had also figured out early on how to run a 3D graphics engine while streaming music.
So we had a tiny little budget for music, which we could use for real bands.
To make their game, the designers tried to reimagine that same ethos.
Hawk:To their credit, Activision had a robust music department.
Eventually, theyd do the licensing stuff forGuitar Heroand so many other IPs.
It wasnt hard for them to get clearance on music.
A lot of them were popular with the skaters, but they werent the biggest thing at the moment.
We were literally just like, These are great tracks that would make an awesome skateboarding game.
Lets see if we can get them with our budget.
Lead singer Jeff Hirshberg remembers getting the call amid an already hectic touring schedule with the band.
Jeff Hirshberg: We were touring 300 days out of the year back then.
Our label called one morning and said, Theyre making this video gameTony Hawks Pro Skater.
They want you to contribute a couple of songs to the soundtrack.
They had already picked the songs they wanted Screamer and Nothing to Me.
We immediately said yes.
We were very unknown at the time.
So they gave us a little bit of money and all the exposure.
Hawk:My main, personal contribution to the soundtrack was the old school punk stuff.
I was listening to the Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, Circle Jerks.
I would send them a bunch of song ideas, or band ideas.
The Suicide Machines were a little newer.
I definitely suggested Goldfinger and Powerman 5000.
We could be a bit more strategic about the music we included.
Hawk:I was a fan of Primus from early on.
To have them in the game was a feather in my cap.
I didnt think of this as needing to help the bands get fans of fame.
I was already a massive fan, and so I was really stoked that they included it.
Getting things in under the radar
Neversoft was a small team, with an even smaller budget.
They managed to do a clean version for the game though.
One developer was Brandon Young, who is now senior director for music affairs at Activision.
Brandon Young:Joel was the guy in our corner.
He was the head and the founder of Neversoft.
He would sit with us in all of our music meetings, every single time.
Hes a passionate music fan.
Pease:You gotta put yourself in the mindset of what the game was.
It was a team of like 12 people, thats why it felt like this little independent skateboarding game.
It felt like an underground band.
We got to kind of do whatever we wanted.
And we usually operated very independently from the mothership.
Our focus was also to stay within the ESRB rating.
Neversoft wanted to take the sensibilities and styles of both to create the culture of the game.
We also had a bunch of friends that were pro skaters at the time like Craig Johnson.
Young:The game started with 10 or so songs on the original.
OnPro Skater 2, its like 15 songs.
I thinkPro Skater 3had 20 songs.
It was just going up, you know?
When we didTony Hawks Underground, it was 75 songs in 2003.
We had this giant soundtrack all of a sudden.
We leaned even heavier on the skate culture sound.
Pease:We wanted to present the entirety of skateboarding.
Youve got guys who are heavily associated with hip hop or punk or thrash metal.
Thats why there are tracks that jump and feel a little random throughout the game.
Hirshberg: We all work together: garage, trashy rock and roll stuff, underground metal.
Its this energy that everything happens at every moment.
Its just like skating.
When youre skating, youre on it every minute, youre in the flow.
If youre not in the moment, youre probably gonna get hurt.
The attitudes, the way people dress, the culture, they both go hand and hand.
The soundtrack still means a lot to so many people.
It wasnt the business model there is now, there wasnt streaming, it didnt cost so much.
We needed tracks that would hit hard from the beginning and work in that two-minute time zone.
That was a part of the selection process too.
Hirshberg:It might have been the first biggamingsoundtrack.
That was their introduction to us.
Pease:Some of the bands really got branded with it, for better or worse.
I think mostly for the better though.
Hawk:For Goldfinger, Feldy [Goldfinger frontman John Feldmann] credits the game with their success.
Pease:Those soundtracks were kind of like the Spotify playlists of their time.
There werent a lot of weirdly curated collections of music.
TheTony Hawksoundtrack became that for a little while there for a certain kind of person.
Hawk:I get handed demos or sent links to new bands all the time.
I keep a folder of them.
Whenever I get one, I think to myself, Maybe, they might work.
There are a bunch that I keep bookmarked.
Hirshberg:Looking back, that was probably the biggest thing the band was ever involved in.
Its a historic game.
Hawk:When the first game was a hit, we immediately started working on the second one.
I dont think I realized the importance of the soundtrack to the users until after that.
I knew how much the music was a part of the game.
There was this trove we hadnt even tapped into.
I still have people talking to me about Tony Hawk soundtracks to this day.
Hawk:Im just blown away that the game resonates still, and people have such reverence for it.
