‘I Know You From Tony Hawk’: An Oral History of the ‘Pro Skater’ Soundtrack

As a middle schooler in 1999 in suburban New Jersey, there wasn’t a massive punk rock scene reaching us 10 year olds. Turn on the radio, and the number one hit was “Mambo No. 5.” You had to go looking for a band like Dead Kennedys. That September though, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater was released, and changed the musical landscape. The game was a near immediate success, but the soundtrack became the first introduction of thrash metal, garage rock, hip-hop and punk music for a wide range of people. 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. A few years earlier, the first ever X-Games had captured audiences and created a wave of interest in skateboarding, BMX biking, and any other extreme sports. In the years that followed, Activision’s goal was to be the home for games covering this newfound fanbase — an alternative to EA’s empire of football and basketball. The ultimate precursor of the game’s success came on June 27, 1999, just a few months before the Pro Skater’s release, when Hawk landed the first ever 900 at the San Francisco X-Games — a move that developers would get Hawk’s avatar to accomplish in the final release, just in time for players everywhere to recreate it. 

To commemorate one of the most enduring video game soundtracks ever assembled, Rolling Stone reached out to some of the key players involved to talk about how it was accomplished. Scott Pease, the former studio director at THPS developer Neversoft, and a designer at Activision, was the point person for Tony Hawk in the game’s development, along with additional producers, and the bands involved.

The early days with Neversoft

This small band of designers and engineers started their plan to create a realistic skateboarding game in 1998 — now they just needed someone to bring in the skater-vision. Hawk’s goal became bringing in the movements and technical aspects of skating, along with the culture. How skaters grip their board for a trick, the types of tricks to include, and capturing the vibe of skaters became his focus.

Scott Pease (former studio director): I have kind of a unique perspective. I actually started at Activision, and was working with Neversoft on the team that was hired to make a skateboarding game. I was like, “Oh man, I would kill to work on a skateboarding game. Let’s do that.” Neversoft was all for it. I became involved with helping get Tony on board with the project and get it off the ground.

Tony Hawk: I went to Activision when they first contacted me to play a sample of what they were working on. They had an engine and animations that could do some tricks. They knew enough about skating generally at that time because the X-Games were coming in strong and skating had evolved a lot over the 1980s to be more technical tricks and street skating was more of a thing. It was pretty obvious that the game was intuitive and that it was fun to play even for those who don’t skate.

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 weren’t currently skaters though. We were video game developers.

Hawk: I think we made skaters out of Neversoft. Okay, sure, for real, they didn’t 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. We subscribed to every skate magazine. It was a lot of doing our homework to get the vibe right because, along with Tony’s vision we wanted to get that all into the game so it would come off as legit. The end result is a balance of what feels grounded and the player being able to do the fantastical.

Hawk: They had built the engine of the game off another one they had, a game called Apocalypse with Bruce Willis. So the first time I played it, it was as Bruce Willis. I immediately felt like I could bring in the resources for some authentic skating — how that could be my contribution. I knew enough about video games and knew enough about what would be fun challenges and what could translate from real life — and that included music.

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. When we linked them together, the game felt like a skate video

The music of skate culture

Skateboarding has always been closely tied to music — just watch anything from Palace or Chocolate Skateboards. To make their game, the designers tried to reimagine that same ethos. Music licensing can get incredibly expensive — luckily, the lesser known punk bands had all of the credibility without the high price tags.

Hawk: To their credit, Activision had a robust music department. Eventually, they’d do the licensing stuff for Guitar Hero and so many other IPs. It wasn’t hard for them to get clearance on music.

Pease: It wasn’t a huge budget, so we had to be scrappy about it and get bands that were cool, but maybe not super popular at the time. A lot of them were popular with the skaters, but they weren’t the biggest thing at the moment. We were literally just like, ‘These are great tracks that would make an awesome skateboarding game. Let’s see if we can get them with our budget. So we’d go out and ask, and some of the stuff would come back and they’d say yes, and we’d say, “Great. Done.”

Of the dozen songs on the final soundtrack — including tracks from The Ernies, The Vandals, The Suicide Machines, Even Rude, and Primus, among others — two are from the band Speedealer, a then-rising punk band from Texas formed in 1992. 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, “They’re making this video game Tony Hawk’s 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. That was all more recent in those years, and how they paired the music that I was giving them.

Pease: After the first game became this surprise hit, we got a bit more budget for the next game and the ones after that. We could be a bit more strategic about the music we included. In the early days though, it was just us scrapping it together like any independent project would, and going with the stuff we liked.

Hawk: I was a fan of Primus from early on. To have them in the game was a feather in my cap. I didn’t 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. This meant having to find bands that wouldn’t break the bank, but also songs that they could get into the game without tripping too many wires. For a few of the more vulgar selections, a few slight edits were made to omit a swear word or splice something out for timing. 

Hawk: When I heard the first few chords of Police Truck, I thought, “How could this even be in here?” I suggested Dead Kennedys, but I didn’t think it was going to be a song about police brutality and shitting your pants. They managed to do a clean version for the game though.

After Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater’s initial success, new team members were brought in almost immediately for what would become new additions to the franchise. One developer was Brandon Young, who is now senior director for music affairs at Activision. His first project was for Tony Hawk’s Underground in 2003, though he remembers what creating a bigger and bigger soundtrack meant to the development of the game. 

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. He’s a passionate music fan. So if there was going to be a problem on the executive side over at Activision, Joel was on it and would have the conversation and be the one in the room. I think Joel won every single argument he ever had with Activision, so he was always the right guy.

Pease: You gotta put yourself in the mindset of what the game was. It was a team of like 12 people, that’s 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.

Young: At the end of the day, if certain songs had profanity in them or certain subject matter, we would do some very slight edits to the originals or mute out curse words. Our focus was also to stay within the ESRB rating. Parents are going to buy the game based on the rating, so they’d know what they were getting themselves into. 

Punk rockers and skaters make a good team

The punk bands and pro skaters have plenty in common. Neversoft wanted to take the sensibilities and styles of both to create the culture of the game.

Hirshberg: I skated a little bit, but the other guitar player in our band was named Mike Noyes, and Mike was always big into skating and going off ramps and things like that. 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. On Pro Skater 2, it’s like 15 songs. I think Pro Skater 3 had 20 songs. It was just going up, you know? When we did Tony Hawk’s 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. All the different skaters in there had different vibes, and there were different genres of music that would do that too. You’ve got guys who are heavily associated with hip hop or punk or thrash metal. With a lot of the different pros in the roster, and we wanted the soundtrack to reflect that too. That’s 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. It’s this energy that everything happens at every moment. It’s just like skating. When you’re skating, you’re on it every minute, you’re in the flow. If you’re not in the moment, you’re probably gonna get hurt. The attitudes, the way people dress, the culture, they both go hand and hand. 

The legacy of a soundtrack

For some of the bands included, this brought in an all new fanbase that would follow them through their careers. The soundtrack still means a lot to so many people. So much so that Hawk, Pease, and those involved still get handed demos and tracks by new bands. 

Hawk: Back then, the coolest thing about getting some of these punk bands was the labels were just excited to have any interest. It wasn’t the business model there is now, there wasn’t streaming, it didn’t cost so much.

Pease: The game itself is also built on the two-minute round concept, so you’re constantly restarting, restarting, restarting. 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 big gaming soundtrack. Later on, we’d have some young kids coming out to shows and say, “Hey, I know you from Tony Hawk.” 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. I think about this now, how we have so many different ways to discover music, but back then we had mixtapes and radio shows and stuff. There weren’t a lot of weirdly curated collections of music. The Tony Hawk soundtrack 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. It’s a historic game.

Hawk: When the first game was a hit, we immediately started working on the second one. I don’t 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 hadn’t even tapped into.

Young: I was getting letters from parents that would say, “Thank you for turning my kids onto the music I was listening to 20 years ago.” I still have people talking to me about Tony Hawk soundtracks to this day.

Hawk: I’d like to think that it introduced punk as a genre to a new generation, but also keeping the reverence and the roots of it. Punk is a big tent. That’s what the musician John Doe once told me, and I’ll never forget it. My wife and I were kids of the Seventies, what we consider punk is not what kids now consider punk. When they’re talking about Blink 182, or Offspring, or Green Day, that all came later. We were there for the absolute beginning of it with Iggy Pop and Sex Pistols and The Clash.

Pease: We got to hang out with these guys in real life and meet them and understand them. That was one of the coolest aspects of making that game — getting to hang out with [skateboarder] Jamie Thomas and talk about life and business and skating and all this stuff. I’d meet these cool people like the [skateboarder] Rodney Mullen — who doesn’t want to hang out with Tony Hawk and Rodney Mullen for a day?

Hawk: I’m just blown away that the game resonates still, and people have such reverence for it. I’m sure it was an important time in people’s lives when they found that music, so if I had anything to do with that, I’m hugely proud of it.

From Rolling Stone US.