How Did I Get Here (5 page)

Quik also signed a separate endorsement deal with me, paying me to wear their Quiksilver-branded clothes and appear in their ads. (I’d approached Quik in the 1980s about a sponsorship, but they turned me down; skating wasn’t big enough at the time, I guess.) I was stoked to join Quik’s team of athletes: It’s a solid company run by people who know and care about the surf, skate, and snowboard cultures. Ten years later, as I write this book, they’re still my clothing sponsor.

The transition to Quik was amazingly seamless; we lived in the same world. The company also had an army of talented designers with years of experience creating action sports-inspired apparel that’s both fashionable and functional. They kept up with trends, and went to great efforts to keep their brands authentic and edgy. Although their origins were rooted in surfing, they’d been making clothes for skaters and snowboarders for years. It was an easy fit.

Quiksilver distributed Hawk Clothing to specialty retailers and department stores throughout the United States, and also expanded into Europe. As a result, the brand grew steadily over the next five years.

Going to the Masses

In 2005, the Kohl’s department store chain cut a deal with Quiksilver to offer a full line of adult- and kid-size Hawk apparel exclusively through its massive chain of stores. This was a huge shift, because it meant we’d be selling the clothes through a single mainstream outlet that was a far cry from neighborhood skate shops. But after attending many meetings with Quik VPs and the Kohl’s team, I realized we could extend action-sport fashion to an audience who hadn’t had access to it before, at better prices, and without sacrificing quality. Kohl’s had lined up similar partnerships with such high-end designers as Vera Wang and Ralph Lauren. We understood the skating subculture, and Kohl’s understood price points and how to market to a broader audience.

When Kohl’s began to design the first season’s line, along with the marketing materials to support it, I grew worried when I saw that they wanted to use my full name, Tony Hawk, instead of just Hawk. They planned to plaster my name across every shirt, every pair of pants, and every hoodie. Suddenly, I was not involved in the approval process when it came to marketing my name, which Kohl’s also planned to use in TV spots and newspaper ads. That scared me. A lot.

I trusted Quiksilver to have their eyes on all of the ads and in-store marketing materials, and initially, I was relieved. The first TV spot Kohl’s created was actually pretty cool. It showed a guy’s hand as he steered a miniature fingerboard across racks and stacks of Hawk clothes. I played a bit part as a stock boy who stops to watch the action. I was in the spot for about two seconds.

But then the first print ads appeared. They featured models holding skateboards, and it was clear to me simply from the way the models gripped the boards that they weren’t real skaters. I cringed. It’s the kind of nuance that goes unnoticed by the average non-skating consumer, but any skater would immediately spot the difference and call bullshit on it all. Even though they had legal right to do whatever they wanted with my name at that point, I had to chime in. We needed to emphasize that the marketing materials were just as important as the clothing design when it came to skate culture.

We reached out to Quiksilver and found out they were also concerned. Fortunately, the Kohl’s marketing people were receptive to our input. A Quik rep and someone from my team began to attend the ad photo shoots, and we provided used Birdhouse skateboards to help control authenticity. My production company, 900 Films, did a photo shoot for print ads they placed in skate mags, and in the end I was happy to see the main Hawk Clothing logo (a stylized bird skull), on a T-shirt worn by a real skater in a serious action shot.

Since then, my relationship with Kohl’s has been great, and they’ve expanded into such categories as hats, belts, underwear, pajamas, socks, and backpacks. Eventually my company, Tony Hawk Inc., penned separate licensing deals with Kohl’s for a full line of footwear and wristwatches. In those deals, I didn’t sell the brand, just gave them the license to sell stuff with my name on it.

I also appreciate that Kohl’s and Quiksilver have supported many of my other outside initiatives, including sponsoring my HuckJam and Birdhouse Tours. And they’ve been generous sponsors at fundraisers for my charity, the Tony Hawk Foundation, which builds skateparks in low-income communities.

I suppose the big lesson here is that if you’re looking to forge an ongoing business partnership with a bigger company, and you have a choice between suitors, go with the one that you trust will continue to respect your expertise, and who will make adjustments based on your suggestions. In that regard, we scored with Quiksilver, and then later with Kohl’s.

4

“IS TONY HAWK A REAL PERSON?”

From motion capture to gaming franchise

In early 1997, I was approached by a software programmer about doing a skateboarding video game for PCs. I'd always been a computer and video game geek, and of course I gravitated toward any digitized version of skating. The first, Atari's
720 Degrees
arcade game, came out in 1986, and I was addicted to it. The next year, Electronic Arts brought out
Skate or Die!
for the Commodore 64, one of the original desktop computers, which finally gave me a chance to play a skateboarding game at home.

It took 10 years for another decent skate game to land: Sega's
Top Skater
, a huge device available only in arcades. You stood on a skateboard, held on to rails, and controlled the virtual rider with your feet as he sped downhill. It was mostly a racing game, though—not really a skate game. And you needed to pour a long stream of quarters into it.

The programmer who approached me was in the
very
early stages of creating a software engine for a skateboarding game, and he needed to partner with an established developer. I was pretty sure that with my help we could create something substantial. We took meetings with a few big companies, including Midway and Nintendo, but they were resoundingly discouraging.

An early meeting with Midway was both disheartening and humiliating, as if we were being grilled by a group of professors who doubted our central thesis—that a skateboarding video game might be profitable. For an hour, they questioned every assertion we made. They said skateboarding wasn't popular enough, that skate tricks wouldn't translate to video game controls. Nintendo rejected us with more tact, but they also showed zero interest. After those meetings, the programmer simply gave up and wished me luck.

But the exercise planted a seed. The more I looked into it, the more I became convinced that technology had advanced enough to create a video game that would attract hard-core skaters and maybe even the general public. And while those first few meetings had felt to me like lynchings, apparently word got around that I was interested in working on a skateboarding video game from the ground up. Within a year, I started receiving some encouraging phone calls.

Before long, I was on a plane to New York to meet with Take-Two (future publishers of
Grand Theft Auto
). I liked what I saw, but they had a long way to go, and it seemed to me that their game direction was uncertain.

From Apocalypse to Genesis

In September of 1998, I got a call from a consultant in L.A. who was working with Activision in Santa Monica. He asked if I would meet with them and their development subcontractor, Neversoft, about a game they already had in the works. They were focused on designing the game for PlayStation. Although PlayStation was clearly the most popular platform at that point, I was leery. I owned and played the three main consoles available of the era—Nintendo 64, PlayStation, and Dreamcast—but liked Nintendo's best because of its graphics.

But the meeting went well, and I was immediately impressed. For one thing, there were a lot of serious skaters on the Neversoft design team, and they were insistent that the characters resemble real skaters doing real tricks. Also, they'd done some demographic research and understood that skateboarding had the best marketing potential among the various action sports. Unlike surfing and snowboarding, skaters were geographically widespread, and they tended to be more devoted than the other subcultures.

Although the game was in the early stages, the controls were intuitive and the engine was perfect for skateboarding. (Neversoft had originally designed it for a game called
Apocalypse
, starring Bruce Willis, but that one flopped.) I was confident that with my input this could be the best skateboarding video game ever created. I agreed to put my name on it and start working.

First, though, we had to work out the financial details. Activision offered me a one-time buyout for the permanent use of my name and likeness on the game. It was a substantial amount of money, and my agent at the time encouraged me to take it, even though a royalty deal (in which I'd get a percentage of every game sold) would earn me more money in the long run if the game turned out to be a hit.

Fortunately, my income-to-mortgage ratio had finally reached a manageable stage, so I wasn't desperate for cash. Also, I could feel it in my bones that the game had potential to be a bestseller. I turned down their offer of a one-time buyout and gambled on royalties instead.

That turned out to be the best financial decision I've ever made. Within two years, I'd made 10 times their initial offer.

Birth of a Genre

We spent more than a year in development. Every time Activision released a new “build,” I played it all the way through and gave feedback. It was important to me that that we populate the virtual world with real skaters (meaning real-life pros) wearing real skate clothes, skating at real skate spots, and riding real gear adorned with real logos. But beyond style, I also wanted to make sure the tricks themselves were legitimate—that if they showed someone doing a Smith grind, for instance, they'd get the whole thing right: not just how the board hits the rail, but also the skater's style and positioning.

“The coolest thing for us was that Tony was game-savvy,” Dave Stohl, who oversaw production of the game for Activision, said in a recent interview. “We were totally surprised. Neversoft did an awesome job—the magic was theirs. But Tony was more involved as a licensor than anyone I've ever seen, before or since.”

I picked a group of pro skaters to include as characters, largely based on their skills, personalities, and diversity. I felt like our roster represented skateboarding well. Each one got to pick his or her own outfit and special trick, and I was thankful that they all trusted my instinct even if they hadn't seen the game before agreeing to be included. (In the first couple of releases, each pro got a cut of the royalties, and they made some pretty good money.)

To get the skaters to look as realistic as possible, we tried to use motion-capture filming. We wore funny suits with iridescent balls attached to pivotal body parts. As we skated, an array of stationary cameras would record every move from about two dozen different angles. A computer would compile the various perspectives and churn out a 3-D rendering. Mocap was still in its infancy, so it didn't work out exactly as planned. I bailed on one run and my runaway board slammed into a camera. It took them four hours to recalibrate the system.

The skin-tight “mocap,” or motion capture, suit is as unflattering as it is uncomfortable.

In the end, the mocap didn't translate well to what Neversoft had already programmed, and the animators ended up mainly depending on existing skate footage for reference. But they were so good that nobody could tell the difference. By luck, I landed my first 900 just weeks before the game went to final submission, and they managed to animate it using video footage and squeezed it in at the last minute.

The music was another important aspect. We were already in uncharted territory, so Activision gave us permission to use the music that had been skateboarding's soundtrack in the late 1970s and early 1980s: punk rock. I was stoked to expose a new crowd to the tunes I'd grown up with, and the first two versions of the game featured bands like the Dead Kennedys, Suicidal Tendencies, The Vandals, Bad Religion, and Rage Against the Machine. We didn't have to rely on hits or shell out outlandish licensing fees, because the game was all about skateboarding. We were proud of our counterculture pursuit, and these were its anthems.

Activision released
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater
in 1999. By the time it hit the shelves, I was more excited than nervous. I was confident it would be well received because I'd played it so much and had shown it to friends whose opinions I trusted—people who'd tell me the truth if they thought it sucked. Everyone who tested it liked that they could make the riders do actual tricks, that they could roam freely around the various skate landscapes, and that the central goal was to complete original tricks and improve your own performance. Unlike other sports video games available at that time, it wasn't about beating someone else, or even the machine—although that was an option if you wanted it. You were basically competing with yourself, just like all skaters do every day.

This is the cover for my very first video game,
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater
.

Courtesy of Activision

I also had confidence that it would find an audience beyond the action-sports world. The graphics were good, the action was good, the music was good—a complete package.

Looking back, I'm still not sure if I was prescient, or just really, really lucky. More of the latter, probably. Either way, the game was a hit. It won a bunch of industry awards (Action Game of the Year from
Electronic Gaming Monthly
magazine, PlayStation Game of the Year from CNET's gamecenter.com, among others).

“For Activision,
THPS
was
the
game,” Stohl said. “The initial expectations were that we'd sell 500,000 to 700,000 units. But then we released it, and every week the buzz kept growing and growing. You could see it spreading through word of mouth.”

It ended up selling more than 7 million copies.

The first release did very well, but the second release,
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2
, was an even bigger hit, especially among serious gamers. According to the review-aggregation web site Metacritic.com,
THPS2
was the best-reviewed video game of the decade, with an average rating of 98 out of 100. It was the second-best selling game of 2000, and at one point was No. 1 on the bestseller list while the first game was still in the top five. Activision sold more than 6.5 million copies of the second game in the first three years of its release.

From 1999 to 2007, Activision released at least one game a year:

The games spawned a steady stream of competing action-sports titles vying for a share of this new market, and I'm still proud to have helped create a gaming genre that helped to solidify skating's place as a legitimate sport—in the real world as well as the virtual world. And despite an ever-growing list of competitors, the
THPS
series remains the best selling action-sports franchise of all time.

Kicking the Reset Button

After eight years, the Neversoft development team was feeling burned out on the Tony Hawk skateboarding game control scheme. I don't blame them. Also, they were shifting focus to the amazingly successful
Guitar Hero
game.