Anyone else would say that spending easily over a thousand hours, perhaps two thousand or more, skating back and forth on tiny maps in Tony Hawk's Underground is stupid. And they'd probably be right. And certainly, anybody else would think that playing that long necessarily means that there's no choice but for me to be good at the game. The second part is most definitely not true.
I had an obsession with Tony Hawk games. A completely and total love and dedication. Tony Hawk games take all of the fun of landing combos in a fighting game, and transfer it to a single player game. Top that with how free form the skating is, how consistently entertaining and naturally scaling the difficulty curve is, and the unreachably high skillcaps set by some of the best players, and you get this experience that is unlike the experience of playing any other game. While the games were ported to many different platforms (and I grew up primarily playing the Xbox versions), I find that the Playstation Dualshock 2 is the optimal controller for the game, with its additional trigger buttons missing on the controllers of other platforms of the era. It was on my (poor, poor) Playstation 2 that I bought the majority of the Tony Hawk games to relive my childhood, and instead ended up defining my teenage years.
That Playstation never turned off. I would leave it on for months at a time playing Tony Hawk's Underground (or occasionally, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4, because of its "Sim Mode" cheat code which made the game more challenging). I would leave my Playstation on for so long that certain animations in the game would start dropping frames, but I didn't care. I was never going to stop. I was going to be the best.
But, the best by what measure? At first I wanted to try and set a high score. A natural enough desire, given the game's design on the surface, but after hitting about 20 million or 30 million points I quickly realized that I was playing against a stacked deck. People had found glitches for this game along with exact skating lines and specific player-created tricks to maximize points to the level of rolling over the score into the negatives. There wasn't really any competition, nobody cared, and the style of skating that was being used wasnt fun. There was something else I was looking for, that wasn't just getting the high score. Something different.
Next, I started speedrunning Tony Hawk's Underground in the early days of Twitch. The community was much smaller then, and everybody in it tended to dislike me for whatever reason (it didn't help I wasn't very likeable), so it wasn't a very positive experience in my life. The runs weren't too bad, but I felt a lot of pressure and I didn't perform as well as I hoped, so I left with nothing but a minor footnote in the history of the game.
That is, except for one small detail. Around this time, I had found some esoteric videos around on YouTube of old gameplay of people doing these show-off combos, skating for style with their tricks and score completely hidden, just for other people to be impressed by their technique. I found my way to some weird forums about the game that I could never find again, where a technique was described called the "buttslap." The power of the buttslap was that, if done correctly, it allowed you to jump 2+ times higher than normal if you roll off of a ledge and hit a button combination versus how you normally jump off of the flat ground. I was able to bridge the gap a little bit and bring this technique to the speedrunning community (which at the time was not using it and did not know how to perform it consistently), which I consider my one small contribution to speedrunning for Tony Hawk's Underground.
And then I stopped to think. This skating I was watching... this "proving" as it's called (as in "prov" from "improv") was something completely unlike any other video game experience I had seen before or since. It wasn't skating to beat some set goal in the game, reach a high score, or complete the game more quickly than other people. It was a subjective art, comparable to ice skating or, as one person put it on that weird forum, free-style rapping. It was no longer a video game by the traditional sense - the game was simply a canvas from which one could create an artistic performance.
So, I put a goal in front of myself. I started recording my gameplay, and I told myself that my goal would be to skate a perfect 2min. In free skate, you can start a 2-minute run and try and set a high score. It lets you skate around as normal, but every time you use a trick after the first time the score you get from it decreases, and there's a two minute time limit, after which as soon as you end your final combo the run stops and tallies up your score. The score itself doesn't matter at all, as we've put earlier: it's all about having the timer. The challenge is to try and get the best run you possibly can jammed into those two minutes (or perhaps longer, if you can keep your combo going past the end of the timer) and create a little performance to upload to YouTube to enjoy forever.
I spent so long after this point playing and recording my gameplay that there is no way in human text to convey how long I was playing for. A thousand hours? Two thousand? Perhaps more? A very, very long time. I recorded all of it, but since I wasn't happy with any of it, I just deleted it. I very rarely even completed a 2min beginning to end, let alone did so to a level that I would call satisfactory. I have one recorded on my (old, now-lost) YouTube account which you can find here, but I was never that impressed with that 2min. So much work went into creating that, and that was me skating pretty well, but nowhere near where I felt like I should have been after so long. A little bit after that, I performed this run as well, which was spectacular even by my own standards, but didn't survive through the whole two minutes (I didn't really survive the two minutes in the first one either, but this one even less so).
By the time I was recording these, I played so much THUG on my Playstation that the console's DVD drive stopped reading discs, so I had transferred much earlier to playing on PC using the Dolphin emulator (which, while there's nothing wrong with the Dolphin emulator at all, the original port of THUG to GameCube has reduced functionality and worse controls compared to the PS2 version). This made recording a lot easier and I was able to play in HD (my PC was too bad to record in full HD quality though), but I still never got very far. It felt like no matter how long I played, I never got more skilled. It was all up to dumb luck if I performed a 2min as good as that second one above, and it infuriated me to no end. My time with the game was a complete dead end. All that time playing, all that time recording, and all that lives on from that entire experience is some speedrun VODs on an old Twitch channel, those two videos, and this essay.
Sometimes I dream of what it would be like to be as good as the great provers. I remember a day when I was probably 15, playing THUG on my Playstation, talking to my cousin's boyfriend while casually, on complete autopilot, playing Tony Hawk out of my fucking mind in the corner of my eye. I probably played better back then than I did 5 or 6 years after that. I would spend 12+ hours a day playing then. Maybe there'll be a game half as entertaining in the next life, and I can be the best at that one. I guess I'll have to wait and see.
May 16, 2022