Architecture became a space of possibility, of excitement. Your school could be a place to conquer if you had the skill and freedom of a skater. That grounding, then, lent an imaginary joy to real places. Almost all of the game's levels take place in normal locations-schools, boardwalks, warehouses-and even though the games do move into some strange, goofy places (like a military base housing aliens or heaven-like, literally, just heaven), its use of basic repeatable types of geography-the straight line, the sharp curve, the ramp-lend the game a sense of grounding. But that sense of independence, that invigoration of mundane spaces, was something about Tony Hawk and skateboarding in general that could be taken into normal life. Most of us probably never learned how to skateboard. See it, plot it, make it happen for yourself.
Some of them seem impossible when you first see them. These objectives-collecting floating letters on the map, grinding or jumping off of obscure bits of level geometry-function as navigational challenges, encouraging you to figure out how to get there. It's all about managing momentum, balance, and routing through a particular level in order to get where you want to go and do it in as much style as possible, racking up points for tricks and accomplishing a set of discrete objectives. Activision and Neversoft, in creating the original games, moved away from the standard blueprint of sports games to create something that feels, at times, more like a platformer. Each sharp angle is a point to grind, each bit of elevation is something to jump toward or from. In these games, every part of the mundane world is bent toward the singular purpose of letting you move faster and better. And if you could learn, if you could be good, good the way these famous skaters were good? Well, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater and its sequel provided a larger-than-life imagining of what that might mean.
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