My 13-year-old brother and his friends invited me to play Tony Hawk. These things all eventually come back to my experience playing the Tony Hawk videogames. Without them, I wouldn’t be the person I am today, in many ways – from my interest in skateboarding and punk music, to less obviously connected parts of myself such as my photography, and many friends. The Tony Hawk games were my first contact with both the world of skateboarding and punk music. My experience of the era of commercial games pre-2003 (when I bought a GameCube at university), therefore, extends mostly to those with integral multiplayer experiences, whether built-in ( Goldeneye 007, Mario Kart: Double Dash, Beetle Adventure Racing), or games that built a community or audience around a spectacle: exhibitionist free-play levels that allowed you to create your own competition, such as Tony Hawk’s Skateboarding (otherwise known as Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater in the US, and Tony Hawk, from here on in). It wasn’t a conscious thing on the part of my (passionately feminist) mother it was just, he asked for them, and I didn’t know they could be ‘for’ me. Like many of the girls from the late ’80s and early ’90s I know in videogames, I didn’t have a console of my own it belonged to my brother.

It was seeing world-class skateboarders on their TV for the first time, in a way that was for many back then – in sleepy, pre-internet English suburban villages and towns – a revelation. This is what caught me, but for hundreds of thousands of others, it was the video footage.

This is the song that opens Tony Hawk’s Skateboarding. But right now, it’s late summer and the Dead Kennedy’s anti-cop song ‘Police Truck’, with its thrumming bass line and thrilling riff, is ringing through my mind.

Eventually I’ll find my way through the genre amongst mislabelled Napster downloads, a 13-track capacity mp3 player, the tape-to-stereo jack in my older friend’s car, and Fat Wreck and Vagrant samplers handily filed under ‘P’ at HMV. It’s late summer 1999, I’m 15 years old and I’m hearing punk music for the first time.

Tony hawk 90s