Elissa Steamer can remember what skateboarding videogames were like before 1999.
She didn’t play a ton of them, and as a kid she was more likely to fire up Mike Tyson’s Punch Out or The Legend of Zelda when she was skipping school. But there was 720, released in arcades and on the original Nintendo. Similarly, there was Town & Country Surf Designs: Wood & Water Rage, another NES game that combined surfing and skating. Skate or Die! was another with 8-bit graphics.
But as Steamer recalls, “none of them
really felt like skateboarding… It was very 1980s.”
Sometime in the late 1990s, Steamer heard that some company was making a video game that Tony Hawk was attached to. At the time, Steamer was then a budding professional skateboarder who had deals with companies like Toy Machine and Baker, and had featured in some of the straight-to-VHS skating tapes that were popular around that time — most notably 1996’s Welcome to Hell where folks can see a then-21-year-old Steamer grinding on benches and pulling off kickflips while sporting baggy pants and some crisp white Adidas kicks as a track from The Sundays plays over the grainy footage.
One day, she found herself hanging out in the garage of fellow pro skater Jamie Thomas who had a sample copy of 1999’s Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. Steamer fooled around with the game a bit on Thomas’ PlayStation, and she was blown away by its look and feel. Thomas then told her, “I think they’re going to reach out to you too.”
A few days later, Steamer was on the phone with the game’s makers, Activision and Neversoft, who pitched her on the idea of being in the game. Having already played a version of it, Steamer didn’t hesitate to sign up. And that’s how she became the first woman to be featured in a Tony Hawk video game.
Now, 26 years later, the impact of that first game is still being felt. Countless people from in and outside of skating have credited it with 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 penned at places like the New York Times and NPR. Game Informer named it one of the 100 Greatest Video Games of All-Time. As kids and adults alike played Graffiti, H.O.R.S.E. 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 pretty low key, and I think that just kind of boosted skateboarding into the mainstream,” Steamer recently told SB Nation. “You didn’t have to be able to ride a skateboard to see skateboarding. You could sort of participate in a game that portrayed skateboarding in such a great way. It got eyes on skateboarding and our names and who we were.
“I think a lot of the early 2000s skateboarding boom was kind of due to this video game.”
Since the success of the original THPS in 1999, the game has produced 20 additional variations and sequels. And Steamer has appeared in quite a lot of them, with the latest being no exception.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 — the fully remade from the ground up versions of sequels originally released in 2001 and 2002 — dropped on July 11. The remake blends what fans loved about those classics with modern upgrades, new tricks, additions to the soundtrack, unique parks and online play.
And there’s more skaters too. Long gone are the days where Steamer was the only playable woman in the game. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 features eight women skaters and also Leo Baker, who identifies as transgender and uses they/them pronouns.
Steamer, who recently celebrated her 50th birthday, feels like the game’s growing inclusion of women, minorities and LGBTQ+ folks has played a large role in exposing skateboarding to more people.
“We’ve learned that if you see somebody like you doing something you want to do, then you know you can do it,” Steamer says. “So, yeah, it’s totally been helpful to women, transgender, queer people. The game’s really inclusive, as the world is becoming and should be. The best thing about skateboarding is that there’s no rules. Just anarchy.”
Nora Vasconcellos was 7-years-old when the first THPS hit the shelves of video game stores. She grew up in New England in what she calls “Cranberry bog land” where there were a lot of barns but not many paved driveways. Simply put, she wasn’t surrounded by skate culture. Still, Vasconcellos couldn’t shake her interest in skating and consumed it through books and magazines she would get at the library.
Then THPS arrived and she soon found herself playing as often as she could at her cousin’s house or on the small TV in her brother’s room.
“I just feel like everything from the music to literally learning who Elissa Steamer was, that was through a video game,” Vasconcellos, now 33, told SB Nation. “It was one of the avenues that I got to explore skating.”
One of the levels in THPS 3 is called “Skater’s Island.” It’s in the latest re-release too and is based on a real skatepark in Rhode Island that was destroyed in 2004. Vasconcellos never got to skate there despite living relatively close, but got to experience it through the game.
“It’s pretty funny, what gets ingrained in your mind,” Vasconcellos says. “I just remember people telling me how sick it was, and then I get to like, kind of relive it, through the video game.”
After playing as Steamer in some of the old video games, Vasconcellos blossomed into a professional skater. She won a gold medal at the 2017 Vans Park Series World Championships and signed with Adidas. One of her skateboards is in the Smithsonian, but being in a Tony Hawk video game seems to come with more social currency than that or other milestones she’s hit in her career.
“There’s a lot of people from all corners of my life who can’t maybe understand what it means to get a Thrasher cover, or can’t maybe understand getting a pro shoe… But they do understand, like, ‘You’re a playable character on Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater,’ because that’s a lot of people’s only interaction with skateboarding. So, it’s very cool.”
Vasconcellos and Steamer are two of the eight badass women featured in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4. The others are Lizzie Armanto, Letícia Bufoni, Chloe Covell, Margielyn Didal, Rayssa Leal and Aori Nishimura.
For Vasconcellos, she seems to believe that if it weren’t for Steamer in 1999, she might not be making her THPS debut in 2025.
“There wasn’t a whole lot of women who were making careers out of skateboarding. I think seeing how that’s blown up… If you’re a woman, you weren’t getting the bigger deals, you were kind of getting scraps. So, it’s kind of cool to see that full circle aspect of it now,” Vasconcellos says. “Granted, we’re not all buying houses off the Tony Hawk game anymore, but back in the day, they did, and that was an avenue for these skaters to create wealth and be themselves. For a girl like me at the time to play and envision myself in that space, it’s pretty cool.”
Skateboarding is arguably as mainstream as it has ever been and the Tony Hawk video games are a big reason why. In 2028 in Los Angeles, skateboarding will appear in the Olympics for the third time.
Back when she was piling up gold medals at the X-Games in the mid-2000s, Steamer — the first woman to go pro in skateboarding and the first woman ever inducted into the Skateboarding Hall of Fame — thought there was a chance the sport might reach the Summer Games someday. Now that they have, she gets to sit back, watch and check out all the awesome young skaters come through on a path that she helped pave.
“I think the future of skating is in good hands,” Steamer says. “I’m just stoked that the game is back and I’m happy to be involved. It’s really great for skateboarding, and I think Tony Hawk is incredible.”
