Author and publisher Cole Nowicki displayed the cover for his new book, Right, Down + Circle, on his Twitter feed, with the comment, "Oh Shit." Excitement abounds. The book is due from ECW Press, an indie Canadian book publisher, in the Fall of 2023. First released in 1999, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater has had twenty iterations, and the soundtracks function as many people's nostalgia jukebox.
"In 1999, the bestselling video game Tony Hawk's Pro Skater was released, and a new generation was exposed to skateboarding culture right in their very own homes. Kids and adults alike could now spend hours playing as actual skateboarders, learning the vernacular, listening to the music skateboarders loved, and having fun onscreen before trying to skate IRL in the driveway. Combining skateboarding history and memoir, Right, Down + Circle explores how a video game starring the most famous pro skater in the world brought skate culture—and its ever-shifting markers of music, subversion, and coolness—to the masses and ultimately transformed the culture it borrowed from in the process."
I think right, down + circle is an airwalk/Christ air. Hawk adapted Rodney Mullen's brilliance and applied the airwalk to vert skating, while Christian Hosoi invented the latter.
For a history of the airwalk, check out episode five of the Tech Files from the Ride Channel.
Check out this interview with Hawk about "Going From Iconic Skater To Video Game Legend."
"It all started way back in 1998 when Tony was looking to get into video games. An avid lifelong gamer, Hawk was looking to attach his name to a game that he could be proud of. Enter Activision and Neversoft. They reached out to Hawk to showcase a prototype skateboard game where they basically ushered him into a room full of suits in Santa Monica to show something that looked like "Bruce Willis with a gun strapped to his back skating through a desert." That concept was quickly scrapped, but Hawk noted that the controls felt good and "intuitive," even to non-skaters. But it wasn't a skating game."
