Tony Hakw's Pro Skater 2
Ultra Cool game #5
Type of Game
A real social issue, responsible for numerous skateboarding accidents worldwide.
Release date on our machines
September 2000, well, I didn't watch the Sydney Olympics much that year.
Developer
Neversoft Entertainment, Inc., a collector of commercial successes, to the point of being swallowed up by the giant Activision.
Publisher
Activision Publishing, Inc., the very giant that consumes successful studios.
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2: unavailable anywhere in its original version. The 1+2 remake is, but 2020 is still twenty years away, so we've got plenty of time.
With Leyland Lampion, my best friend from my teenage years, we had already worn out the first game to the bone, so much so that we decided we would jump on the sequel before we even knew it existed. Knowing how good he was at getting his parents to buy him whatever game he wanted, whenever he wanted, I wasn't surprised when I turned up at his house one day in 2000 and found him revelling in this game that glorified coolness through putting yourself and others in danger. It was a veritable bible for young high school students like us, who were still finding our feet. This game served up our social identity on a plate, and I can't thank him enough for that, before someone else does it for him. Sometimes I wake up with a start, drenched in sweat, after having a nightmare in which I followed a different trend. For example, PES or Fifa (I almost did, thanks to the 1998 World Cup), or worse still, Metal Gear! Argh! Call of Duty! Gargl! Any title from The Lord of the Rings franchise! Halo! Fortnite! Krrrrrkr! World of Warc... OK, I'll stop before I have a stroke. Sorry to fans of these franchises. No offence, but stay away from me. I played League of Legends for ten years, so I'm no better than you.
Second board
Gravity has no power here
Back then, when we still talked about the twenty-first century as if it were in the future, even though it had already begun, we still thought in terms of replaying the same game, enhanced with a few extra features and slightly less ugly graphics, ‘It was seriously mentally awesome, m***f***!’ Quote preserved as is. A significant number of sequels resembled DLCs of varying lengths. We were served up the same thing as the previous game, but a little better and a little less ugly. Sometimes much better, as in the case of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. More characters, more tricks, more gear, more levels, more music... of course we were going to start all over again! Take our money, damn it! Well, our mums' money, that is. So off we went again for hours of grinding away at the new stages, including the skate park in Marseille! Marseille was on the opposite side of the country from Le Havre, but we didn't care. There was a FRENCH level in a TONY HAWK game!! ‘This is mega delirious madness’! Quote preserved as is here too.
Before comparing our respective skills in split-screen versus mode, we absolutely had to complete career mode for each of our characters. Leyland chose Chad Muska, I think, but maybe I'm totally wrong. I set my sights on Bob Burnquist, whom I called Bob Burnouste for a long time because I misread his name. He wore a bucket hat (called bob in french), in addition to being called Bob, and I wore one too when I rode. I saw it as a sign of destiny, something mystical that would make me better. We wanted to push our avatars' abilities to the max before pitting them against each other. But since I didn't own the game, Leyland trained hard at home all the time, while I blew up my little sister Rebecca with thousands of bombs in Bomberman Party Edition. So the career mode was enough for me, especially since to complete it 100%, you had to "work your butt off". Quote preserved... oh no, I'm just a huge boomer. Collecting the letters S-K-A-T-E, the VHS tape, the banknotes... all levitating somewhere in each of the levels.
Performing a specific trick in a specific place to complete a mission, managing to string together tricks without transition thanks to the manual, consisting in the skater balancing on their back or front wheels instead of just rolling along. This allowed you to keep accumulating score multipliers and break all the limits. All this with the aim of earning as much money as possible, and therefore enough to buy the best boards, improve our avatars' skills so that they fell a little less often, and unlock all their tricks. Well, I lived only to transform my beloved Bob Burnouste into a beast who could pull off a 720 kickflip to indy + varial to mute invert on a tiny little module. Then he'd go into a manual to a rail, follow up with an FS Crooked + Rocket Tailslide before finishing with a 540 Racket Air. Goofy, of course. So imagine what that would look like on a huge ramp.
This game has a very urban vibe... yeah, no kidding! Most of the stages are set in real, existing locations, albeit slightly modified. This made it really easy to identify with, and we inevitably tried to make our city our own, too. People were skating in the streets, and the entire city had been transformed into a giant playground. Of course, unlike in the virtual world, if we rode over baby strollers and jumped over three buses in a row, the police would show up pretty quickly. But skating meant above all showing off by adopting a very particular lifestyle and forging a social identity with well-defined codes. But sorry, I said I was riding, but I forgot to mention one detail. I didn't skate, if I forget the month and a half during which I tried to perform a poor, shabby ollie.
Tony Hawk's Social Club
Leyland, Randall and I had been rollerblading for some time. I have no idea where the rivalry with skateboarding came from, but it sometimes served as an excuse for fights. To be honest, by the time we took off our rollerblades to fight with them, the skateboarders had already beaten us up with their boards. We were already getting beaten up enough by the guys in tracksuits from the neighbourhood, though. We didn't need any more. But in the end, we didn't care, it didn't stop us from thinking we were cool. We would jump over three steps, spinning around and grabbing a wheel with our fingertips. We imagined we were defying the laws of physics, just like in the game. Sometimes we would fall and bleed, just like in the game, except that our scabs didn't disappear in a second.
New era of tolerance
I don't know if it was like that everywhere, but where I grew up, our dressing style influenced the types of music we listened to. Or vice versa. The chicken or the egg. And the farm too. Most skaters were into rock/punk/metal, while rap was reserved for the ‘cailleras’, the guys from the rough neighbourhoods (or who pretended to come from a rough neighbourhood), dressed in tracksuits. And the girls? They belonged to the style, um... the girl style, that's it. Any breach of the rules could lead to severe punishment! Exclusion from the group of friends, insults, beatings... that was our daily lot (in reality, things often went very well, as long as we respected the conditions). Imagine our surprise when we heard as much rap as rock during our Tony Hawk 2 games! But then, could such sacrilege exist without causing a global riot? Seriously, what a divine revelation we had that day! From then on, I started wearing baggy trousers with holes in them that were three sizes too big, while listening to Suprême NTM and Dr. Dre. Until then, I had been doing it in secret. At secondary school, while one group was teasing me about my big trainers and long hair, another lad turned up with his finger in the air and announced: "Yeah, he's a stupid moronic skater, but he listens to rap!" A big awkward silence ensued, then everyone suddenly left me alone, as if I had acquired some kind of unlikely status, making me invisible. It was still better than a split eyebrow and three broken teeth every month. Fortunately, attitudes have changed. I think. So even though I usually repeat tirelessly that I much prefer an O.S.T. composed specifically for a game, rather than existing tracks that have been put together in a compilation, I still have to thank the Tony Hawk soundtrack for breaking down the mental barriers of a whole generation of teenagers. I'm not the only one who thinks that, right? Was I the only one who got beaten up for rollerblading with M.O.P. members yelling in my ears?
Tony Hawk’s Skateparking
When you become a teenager, you start going out at night. When you're already a geek before you even become a teenager, going out at night can basically mean hanging out at your mates' houses playing video games all night long. Since my mum went away every weekend to build her future house fifty kilometres from our flat, going out at night meant staying at home and having friends over. I had the place to myself for about a hundred days a year. So coolishly bombastic ! (And here I go again with my outdated expressions, sorry). That didn't mean I was going to act like a gangster on the streets of Le Havre. Most of the time, my sidekick Leyland would bring his Tony Hawk 2 CD-ROM, and if we didn't succumb to the temptation to switch to Gran Turismo 2, we could spend hours on the LEVEL editor! Designing our own skate parks and then testing them out was the ultimate achievement for Bob and Chad. Our stages were buggy and completely incoherent, but we loved them. We could finally show off by riding around in OUR creations. Nothing else mattered in life... except listening to the Fonky Family with oversized Vans on our feet.
We even included secret gaps, bonuses with unique names that appeared when you jumped or slid in the right place. For example, when you jumped over a fountain, you unlocked the ‘Coule Jumpe’. Coule for cool, but over the water of the fountain. Coule (flow in french), water... aaaanyway. Why an e in Jumpe? Yeah, I don't know. We also accidentally made our character fall inside a set, but the game considered him to still be in the air, so we could perform endless tricks. The score reached completely crazy levels, based on fifty spins. We filled the screen with the names of the tricks that made up this space combo. The kind of thing that brightened up our days, until we got hit in the face with a board again.
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