How the Original Tony Hawk Soundtracks Came Together

Earlier today I posted about how the soundtrack from MVP Baseball 04 helped tie together this re-created trailer in MLB The Show 20, but no series encompasses that feeling more than the original Tony Hawk games. It introduced me to bands like the Dead Kennedys as a young kid and helped shape a lot of my early music tastes. Elliott talked a lot about this when he originally discussed the Tony Hawk remake, and now IGN had a chance to speak with a lot of the people who got all that music into the original Tony Hawk games.

The entire article is worth reading, but I think what I appreciate most about how the music was selected is there was clearly a love for skateboarding that came through in the tracks. Skateboarding feels so mainstream now, and Tony Hawk as a property — beyond just the man himself — feels like something that is accepted in suburbia nationwide. However, there was a time where skateboarding was not in any way a mainstay in popular culture. I was not skating or watching skating videos or anything like that as a kid. But then Tony Hawk comes out and it’s a hit, and I hear all this music I’ve never heard before and it just adds to that snowball effect.

When I think about sports, it’s hard for me to tie specific music to the sport itself. It can ebb and flow through decades to some degree, but if anything I think about network music introducing us to sports broadcasts more than I think about “normal” music being tied to the sport. Skateboarding is different in that way, and it’s why talking about how these soundtracks came about still has cache even 20 years later.

[IGN] – The Making of the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater Soundtrack