The Emotional Legacy Of 'Tony Hawk's Pro Skater'

For a lot of people, the light-as-air guitar riff and clear-blue horns that prologue the song "Superman," by Goldfinger, can surface memories of a simpler time, when ska was something you might have been expected to know about.

I never owned a Tony Hawk video game myself, but I do have an older brother. This past weekend, Jorge and everyone else got the chance to revisit this cultural artifact via the remastered Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2, released on Sep. 4. The level maps and game mechanics are mostly the same as they were 20-odd years ago, this time rendered in 4K, with some new features like an online multiplayer mode, new goals and additional tricks from later games. Jack Black is there. Along the original roster of playable characters (aged up to the present), you can play as a younger, more diverse set of skaters including Nyjah Huston, Leo Baker, Leticia Bufoni, Aori Nishimura, Lizzie Armanto, Riley Hawk, Tyshawn Jones and Shane O'Neill.

The soundtrack, one of the game's most enduring legacies, also features 37 new musical artists, in addition to most of the originals, from A Tribe Called Quest to Sublime to Screaming Females to Skepta to CHAII to Machine Gun Kelly and more. Jorge messaged me a photo of his hand outstretched, pointing to a corner of the screen reading "The Ataris - All Souls Day," that he captioned "gasp."

Jorge was 13 when was first released on the PlayStation in 1999. And while he discovered the game before I did, his earliest memory of playing it lines up with mine — in a duplex in Miami Lakes that our aunt and grandmother shared. I sat on the