The Ringer: All Posts by Anthony John Agnello2019-11-11T06:10:00-05:00https://www.theringer.com/authors/anthony-john-agnello/rss2019-11-11T06:10:00-05:002019-11-11T06:10:00-05:00How ‘Halo 2’ Invaded a Planet and Created the Modern Video Game Experience
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<p>Online multiple players, esports, and viral marketing—all owe something to the revolutionary Xbox first-person shooter. On its 15th anniversary, creators, executives, and players reflect on the game’s legacy.</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="qkaLZq"><em>Halo 2 </em>begins with a celestial siege. Thousands of alien lizard people, religious zealots with improbable jaws toting mean-looking laser swords inside their bulbous spaceships, crash into Earth to claim it as their own. Humanity’s only defense is Master Chief. The space marine is a walking tank whose face is a single head-sized Oakley lens. He’s gifted with a remarkable talent for blowing up whole squads of aliens. With the help of artificial intelligence embodied by what appears to be a nude, prophetic American Apparel model named Cortana and a turncoat alien called the Arbiter, ol’ Chief keeps humanity alive. Barely. It is patently ridiculous, an absurd action-figure collision as conceived by an 8-year-old drunk on Capri Sun and James Cameron movies. It remains, 15 years later, awesome. It became the best-selling entertainment release—not video game, but <em>entertainment</em>—of all time when it arrived on November 9, 2004. </p>
<p id="WxXGfO">This is the game that defined what mainstream video games are and how they play for the century to date. That Bungie, the video game studio that created the <em>Halo</em> series, began its work with an interstellar force crashing into the planet is deeply fitting. <em>Halo 2</em> was the video game equivalent of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater">Chicxulub asteroid</a> that may have caused the K-T extinction, wiping out the ecosystem that preceded it and making way for what followed. We can see the crater now when we look at everything from the way games control to the way YouTube stars build careers out of dicking around in <em>Fortnite</em>. Tom “Ogre2” Ryan, one of the very first American esports champions who made his first big money on the competitive scene that grew out of <em>Halo 2</em>, puts it more simply: “They created the prototype of how to do shit.”</p>
<p id="b2wc9F">What made <em>Halo 2</em> so powerful on release wasn’t just how it made spacemen blowing up toothy aliens delightful, but how it made every aspect of blowing them up a collaboration. From the moment <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz6FNKawJBc"><em>Halo 2</em>’s trailer hit movie theaters</a>—the first theatrical trailer for a game ever released—the game became something people did <em>together</em>. <em>Halo 2</em> was the birth of the video game as we know it today: a mass shared experience.</p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="qJg9G4">Prior to the release of the original <em>Halo </em>in 2001, the video game industry was skeptical of Microsoft. It was an American software company with limited experience making things that were supposed to be fun, and it was entering a market dominated by entrenched Japanese companies like Nintendo and Sony that commanded an overwhelming share of people’s attention. Even <em>Halo: Combat Evolved</em> didn’t outwardly seem like a promising draft pick for Microsoft’s Xbox. While first-person shooters—games where you roam around and blast things from the point of view of a character—were popular in the wake of ’90s crossover phenoms like the famously violent <em>Doom</em>, Bungie’s game was supposed to be a profoundly different beast. Before Microsoft acquired the studio in 2000, with barely a year to go before the Xbox’s release, <em>Halo</em> was planned as a third-person action game with a heavy focus on strategy, exclusively available on Apple computers. When it was retooled as a first-person shooter, it barely made it out the door as a launch title for the game console’s release. </p>
<p id="RBP5li">“The vision for the single-player game was realized in <em>Halo</em>, but the team also had ambitions to, in their words, revolutionize multiplayer with <em>Halo</em>,” recalled Max Hoberman, a veteran game designer who joined Bungie at the end of the ’90s and was the lead mind behind <em>Halo 2</em>’s multiplayer modes. “That wasn’t realized. Everyone was so busy just getting a single-player game out and getting it working on console that multiplayer basically got set aside. We just had to scramble and just throw something together, <em>anything</em>, together.”</p>
<p id="2RbqZ7">What Bungie threw together was simple but ultimately effective.<em> Halo: Combat Evolved </em>was what sold the console, moving <a href="http://halo.bungie.net/news/content.aspx?type=topnews&cid=7139">more than 5 million copies</a> in the next three years and helping the Xbox sell a modest but impressive 1.5 million units in November and December 2001. People were drawn to the simple science-fiction toy aesthetic of Master Chief and the ability to play simple matches of games like capture the flag—one team of red Master Chief look-alikes trying to sneak into the home base of a blue team—with up to 16 people by linking up to four consoles together, not online but using ethernet LAN cables. Before the 2002 launch of online service Xbox Live, people would lug chunky black machines to each others’ houses, string them together with cords, and spend the night shouting at each other and laughing. “We had a big group of friends that lived on the street and that rode the school bus that played games,” recalled Ryan, who was 15 when <em>Halo</em> came out. “Something about it resonated with us and we just loved it so much.”</p>
<p id="nr6u4G">The reach of <em>Halo</em> was limited, though. Five million copies sold, even if tons of people were sitting in a dorm playing a single copy, wasn’t exactly reaching a blockbuster-sized crowd. Compare the numbers for the original <em>Halo</em> to those of the era’s dopey sci-fi standard bearer: <a href="https://www.fastcompany.com/3060512/forget-box-office-which-star-wars-movie-was-seen-by-the-most-people">Approximately 85 million people saw <em>Star Wars: The Phantom Menace</em></a> in theaters. Bungie and Microsoft weren’t reaching those heights, but their ambitions for <em>Halo 2</em> were <em>Star Wars</em>–level in scope. To that end, Microsoft expanded the team of forward-thinking artists and storytellers beyond its internal staff and the crew at Bungie. Elan Lee, then an Xbox expat, was one of its secret weapons. </p>
<p id="NX8kjK">By 2003, Elan Lee had quit the Xbox team to help start a new company. Lee was barely in his 20s and had roots not just in the Xbox brand but <em>Star Wars</em> as well. He joined Lucasfilm to work on digital effects when he was just 18 years old before getting headhunted by Microsoft to work as the lead game designer for the Xbox console team. After getting the box out the door in 2001, he was cooked. “Everything we built there we had to invent from scratch. I really loved it,” Lee said. “I needed to resign because as soon as we launched the very first Xbox, Microsoft came right back around and said, ‘OK, get to work on the sequel.’ I was burned out.” He quit and cofounded 42 Entertainment, which specialized in alternative marketing and storytelling. Burned out on Xbox or not, Microsoft became his first client. 42 Entertainment kick-started the multifaceted communal experience that would eventually make <em>Halo 2</em> so influential. Years before marketers started leveraging social media games—think scavenger hunts, contests, etc.—as a strategy to raise awareness, <em>Halo 2</em> inspired a viral, shared multiplayer game before the actual video game was even done. </p>
<p id="PRTlWF">“‘A cultural event’—I remember that phrase set off little fireworks in my brain because no one had ever used such a grand statement when it came to telling a story before,” said Lee, recalling his conversation with former Xbox marketing director Chris Di Cesare, who brought 42 Entertainment into the Xbox fold. “‘We specifically want to tell a story that will be a cultural event.’ And that for me was world-changing. All I have to do is think up what the hell that is.”</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="fHh76M"><q>“‘A cultural event’—I remember that phrase set off little fireworks in my brain because no one had ever used such a grand statement when it came to telling a story before.” — Elan Lee, 42 Entertainment cofounder</q></aside></div>
<p id="tAAWVo">Lee, Susan Bonds, and the other founders of 42 Entertainment used the sci-fi setting of <em>Halo</em> and the appeal of the game’s basement get-togethers as inspiration for the unusual <em>Halo 2</em> prequel called <em>I Love Bees</em>, a viral marketing campaign that used online platforms and pay phones to draw players in. Running from July 2004 to just before <em>Halo 2</em>’s release, <em>Bees</em> was one of the first alternate-reality games, similar to a story- and puzzle-based real-world scavenger hunt like <a href="https://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/nation/dark-knight-arg-why-so-serious-alternate-reality-game"><em>The Dark Knight</em>’s <em>Why So Serious?</em></a> or the myriad games associated with HBO’s <em>Westworld</em>. Alternate-reality games are, at their heart, mysteries that need to be solved through shared information. <em>I Love Bees </em>was one of the first. It told the story of that big alien invasion that opens <em>Halo 2 </em>in the last cultural window before MySpace and Facebook made social media ubiquitous. “I did what I always do: steal from people who are way smarter than I am,” joked Lee about <em>I Love Bees</em>’ genesis. “When I sat down to look at the script for <em>Halo 2</em>, it was a really beautiful story. Aliens invading, a huge epic narrative. And I realized this has already been done before. This is Orson Welles’s <em>War of the Worlds.</em>”</p>
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<cite><a class="ql-link" href="http://ilovebees.co/" target="_blank">Ilovebees.co</a></cite>
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<p id="1d5tHV">Luring people into a proverbial rabbit hole was the key to opening <em>Halo 2</em> to that <em>Star Wars</em>–sized audience. The theatrical trailer for <em>Halo 2</em> teased players with a very briefly glimpsed website domain: <a href="http://ilovebees.co/">ILoveBees.co</a>. The site was a honey pot, precisely crafted to come off as so alluringly bizarre that people would be drawn into the world of <em>Halo 2</em> without realizing what was happening. It was conceived by a core crew of creators including Elan Lee and Susan Bonds, an engineer and the 42 Entertainment CEO who began her career designing Disney attractions like the Indiana Jones Adventure. Bonds said that <em>I Love Bees</em> was the answer to a simple question: “How do we increase the <em>Halo</em> effect?”</p>
<p id="IBKsRI">Anyone who visited the site was met with what looked like some apiculturist’s GeoCities fan page until it warped into a cryptic set of GPS coordinates and time stamps. When people started visiting those physical locations at the listed times, they found ringing pay phones. Players who answered the call had to correctly answer a question like “What’s my name?” that they’d have to learn by following updates on ILoveBees.co. Those that gave the right answer got to hear a first-person account of the invasion Master Chief was trying to push back, and they in turn would unlock that for all the people following along online at ILoveBees or on <a href="https://halo.bungie.org/misc/ilb_reordered/">fan-curated pages like Bungie.org</a>. The story was bananas. A network of artificial intelligences was sending warnings about the invasion back in time! Freedom fighters were barely keeping the aliens at bay! It was intoxicating. “The people who loved <em>Halo</em> already, now they have something new to talk about. [To everyone else now] they’re not those crazy people who sit at home with their Xbox and their controller,” Bonds said. “<em>Halo 2</em> was about something that means something to every one of us: aliens showing up on planet Earth. I care about it because I care about me and I live on planet Earth and all of a sudden we got aliens showing up.”</p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="2k3ndi"><q>“I realized this has already been done before. This is Orson Welles’s <em>War of the Worlds.</em>” — Lee</q></aside></div>
<p id="aTKk6V">People got <em>into </em>it. “We had to call the police multiple times because our players got so into the act of answering these pay phones that they would get themselves in trouble,” said Lee, still baffled by the response years later. “We had reports of players trying to run across freeways. We had to intervene because these are people who are going to literally kill themselves to play this game.” <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/04/technology/circuits/scifi-fans-are-called-into-an-alternate-reality.html">One <em>I Love Bees</em> player in Florida went out into</a> a hurricane to reach one of the pay phones. Someone plastered a poster for <em>I Love Bees</em> in the spin room of the third Kerry-Bush presidential debate and it was spotted by players <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20110710053650/http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2004/10/65365">when the room flashed on CNN</a>. “We know that the group [answering phones] was somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 people who really physically got out into the world and did something,” recalled Bonds. “And then we know how many unique IPs were helping put together the story because it had to be assembled online. We know that that was like 2.5 million people, maybe closer to 3 million people once all the press stories came up.” In 2019, we take this kind of stunt to get people involved in a game or movie as rote. (<a href="https://www.hbo.com/peteypedia">HBO’s <em>Watchmen</em> has its Peteypedia</a>, etc.) In 2004, <em>I Love Bees </em>made <em>Halo 2 </em>feel omnipresent without also feeling predatory or cynical. By the time the prequel was wrapping up, Microsoft had already sold 1.5 million preorders for the game. The momentum was building. The way the game itself let people play together cemented its success.</p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="BbwDql">“How do we top something that became a cultural phenomenon by accident?” This was the challenge facing Brian Jarrard, <em>Halo</em> community director at 343 Industries who joined Bungie back in 2003. He remembers the process of bringing <em>Halo</em> multiplayer to a larger audience. “How do we feed it, grow it, but make sure we don’t chop the legs out from under it?” he said. The answer was to bring the game online. At Bill Gates’s insistence, the Xbox offered broadband internet technology, even though only <a href="https://www.ncta.com/timeline-the-impressive-rate-of-broadband-deployment-and-adoption-in-america">9 percent of American households had broadband access</a> in 2001. By the time <em>Halo 2 </em>released, that number had increased to more than 30 percent. Xbox Live, after more than a year in operation, had worked out most of its kinks and let Xbox owners get online to play with little of the hassle associated with doing so on home computers. “Xbox Live had been around for months before <em>Halo 2</em> released, but there was nothing really paying it off,” said Frank O’Connor, current day director of the <em>Halo</em> franchise at 343 Industries. He also joined Bungie in 2003. “What Max Hoberman and the Bungie team built into <em>Halo</em>’s DNA with Xbox Live was recreating that couch experience online because that was where the joy was. Not, you know, ‘Here’s a bunch of server lists and you can join and hope you don’t get kicked out or join and get destroyed because you don’t have the skill.’”</p>
<p id="l5m7RH">Max Hoberman founded the game development studio Certain Affinity and joined Bungie as a user-interface designer in 1997. He went on to found the Bungie.net community and later designed <em>Halo 2</em>’s groundbreaking online multiplayer structure and game modes. Without Hoberman, there’s no playing <em>Halo 2</em> on the internet. At least, not as people came to play it. When Bungie was forced to get the first <em>Halo</em> out the door under a breakneck deadline, it had to abandon more ambitious plans for its multiplayer modes. Hoberman said that the majority of Bungie wanted to completely give up the basic ways to play as a group that were packaged in the original <em>Halo</em> despite how strongly players responded to them. They instead wanted to make something revolutionary for expert players. After lobbying Bungie founders Jason Jones and Alex Seropian to evolve what had organically taken off at those LAN parties, Hoberman was put in charge of all multiplayer for <em>Halo 2</em>. The foundation was the Virtual Couch, a base for what his <a href="https://twitter.com/MaxHoberman/status/1189555877512175622">original design</a> pitch describes as “a dynamic, friendly, intelligent online community.”</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="z91gWd"><q>“We had to intervene because these are people who are going to literally kill themselves to play this game.” — Lee</q></aside></div>
<p id="tVFYLt">“The idea was to make the experience of playing online as similar as possible to the experience of playing on a couch together in a LAN party,” Hoberman said. “You choose <em>who</em> you want to play with before you choose <em>what</em> you want to play, right? The way game matchmaking worked prior to <em>Halo 2</em> is you really choose what you want to play first. That was the impetus for the party system, which was probably the biggest original invention in all of <em>Halo 2</em> actually.”</p>
<p id="066WjW">Prior to <em>Halo 2</em>, playing a shooting game online on your PC was exactly like Hoberman describes: You would fire up the game, connect to the internet, and start looking at servers for a match with little to no guidance from the game itself. For most people, these were overwhelming technological and social barriers; you more or less had to learn two distinct languages to make the technology work and then penetrate the internal workings of every single game’s private world. Coupled with Xbox Live, though, <em>Halo 2</em> placed you into a global community where you could reach out to your existing friend group in the same way you would on Instagram today. Search their username, there they are. Meet someone in a match, add them to your friend list. And all of it is anchored by the party system created by Hoberman. When you turned on <em>Halo 2</em>, you could pick which of your friends you wanted to play with regardless of what type of match you wanted to play or whether you wanted to play through the game’s story together. Today, in-game parties are standard in online games, an expected feature as common as the ability to pause.</p>
<p id="3jpunB">So too is skill-based matchmaking. Rather than throw you into an unknowable pool of opponents, <em>Halo 2</em> would look at how you played and pair you with people in generally the same geographic region and skill level. “Matchmaking didn’t exist. It wasn’t a thing,” Jarrard said. “We were terrified because for the fan community that was a huge sea change for them to wrap their head around, like we’re going to kind of be the DJ and sort of serve up games for you to play. Every single game on the planet nowadays has matchmaking now. You also have servers as an option, but matchmaking became the de facto just because it works. It’s super simple. It’s transparent.”</p>
<p id="xDue3F">Favoring an open, welcoming approach to playing a game together was another <em>Halo 2 </em>innovation. “I’m not the best player,” Hoberman said. “I’m a good bellwether for going broader and making a game that’s far more accessible and doesn’t cater only to the top 20 percent of skilled players. I was swimming upstream in doing that because the vast majority of the people at Bungie were much more hardcore gamers.” It was Hoberman’s belief that the most important thing <em>Halo 2</em> could do was make people that, well, sucked—beginners, parents, or casual gamers—feel like they could still hang even when they ultimately lost matches. The idea was that a <em>Halo 2</em> match shouldn’t inevitably end with one veteran player shutting out a scrub 25 points to nothing. The scrub should, through luck or practice or stubbornness, walk away with some points for themselves. If the game was balanced only to the best, no one else would want to play. This was supposed to be a game for <em>everybody</em>.</p>
<p id="Rn3BdU">Bungie got to watch people start playing it in real time the moment it hit shelves on November 9, 2004. The Bungie team rented out a party bus to take to a GameStop in Redmond, Washington, near the studio where they could hang out with fans waiting to pick up the game. They ordered pizza, joked about the game, and shared stories of <em>Halo </em>LAN parties. When midnight rolled around, though, everyone was gone. And the team watched the game come to life. “We’re high-fiving people and shaking hands and talking to people, but then when the store opened at midnight and people got their games, they just vanished,” O’Connor said. Back at Bungie’s studio, the team could look at a map of the planet, where every player connecting to the game’s servers appeared as a little light on the screen. Everyone was playing, even in places where Xbox Live wasn’t officially open for business. “Seeing that light in South Africa, in Cape Town, was stunning because to this day, when you look at online gameplay numbers, you’ll see the bulk of Africa is dark. The world shrunk by the arrival of it.”</p>
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<cite>Photo by Chris Hondros/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Fans of the game Halo 2 stand in line before midnight at the Toys ‘R’ Us store in Times Square November 8, 2004 in New York City. </figcaption>
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<p id="97MrMY">The game remains a model for almost every game that’s followed, even in the PC community, whose rigid barriers <em>Halo 2</em> worked so hard to remove. Apps like Discord go so far as to let you form parties before you decide what to play at all. Even <em>Halo 2</em>’s basic controls became the expected norm, cementing shooters around the controller rather than the mouse-and-keyboard-dominated ’90s. “You don’t have the one-to-one pixel precision of a mouse,” O’Connor said. “So how do we approximate that in a way that doesn’t feel like training wheels, doesn’t feel like you’re being guided, but works at that kind of speed with analog stick movement. And so you ended up with things like magnetism, stickiness, and so on. So you have these little assists that have always been designed to make you feel like that’s a natural extension of your ability. And that’s still true in almost every FPS game.” </p>
<p id="Hiaa1K">In its first year, <em>Halo 2 </em>sold more than 7 million copies, 2.3 million of which it did in just the first day, far outpacing its predecessor’s lifetime sales on Microsoft’s debut machine. While those aren’t quite <em>Star Wars</em> numbers, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20120203033402/http://www.gamespot.com/news/microsoft-raises-estimated-first-day-halo-2-sales-to-125-million-plus-6112915"><em>Halo 2</em> made $125 million in a single day</a>, more than even the highest-grossing opening weekend box office of any movie up to that point. People played <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20100801214218/http://www.itwire.com/your-it-news/entertainment/10249-xbox-live-6-million-users-and-counting-thumbs-nose-at-ps3-wii">710 million hours of the game by 2006</a>. “We suddenly began to look at one true global community,” said Brian Jarrard, “which was pretty amazing, but also kind of terrifying to be honest.”</p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="DrQpt7">When Tom Ryan and his brother Dan started playing <em>Halo</em> and exploring the tiny tournament scene that existed in the United States before 2004, they were playing for fun, or a little modest glory. “Our first tournament was at Ohio University about two hours away,” Ryan said. “I think the prize was like 200 bucks in gift cards or something. It might’ve even been like 50 bucks.” By the time he was known as Ogre2, dominating <em>Halo 2</em> tournaments in the mid-’00s, he was creating the model for modern esports celebrity. Even though <em>Halo 2</em>’s monumental success grew out of a broad, accessible approach to bringing goofy sci-fi to the public—through pay phones, through considerate design, through sharp iconography—it also altered the landscape of professional gaming. Prior to the fall of 2004, the nascent competitive scene in the U.S. was restricted to college campuses and basements. <em>Halo 2</em> gave birth to the big spectator incarnation of American esports that exists today. </p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="BQgXvD"><q>“We suddenly began to look at one true global community, which was pretty amazing, but also kind of terrifying to be honest.” — Brian Jarrard, <em>Halo</em> community director at 343 Studios</q></aside></div>
<p id="PqFncV">“Esports in general wasn’t really a thing in North America. <em>Counter-Strike</em> was big in Europe. <em>StarCraft </em>was going on over in Korea,” Ryan said. “That’s when the scene in the U.S. blew up with <em>Halo 2</em>. … We were really excited. We knew that we’d be able to play online and we could really like take it to the next level. Holy crap, this is cool. We can travel around all year and make some decent money.” Ryan recently took over as general manager of the Call of Duty League Florida franchise, which is part of one of the dozens of global esports leagues currently operating. The Call of Duty League tournaments spawned out of Major League Gaming in 2016. MLG itself was founded in 2002, but its first televised big-money competition? That was 2006’s Boost Mobile MLG Pro Circuit, a broadcast of <em>Halo 2</em> Pro Series. “People always ask us: Are you jealous or do you wish you were born like five or 10 years later because you would’ve made millions in prize money instead of a couple of hundred thousand over 10 years?” Ryan said. “The silver lining is we feel like we had a lot more fun. It was a more intimate scene.” </p>
<p id="hVkZsw">Max Hoberman also sees an object lesson in <em>Halo 2</em> for any game maker trying desperately to gain a foothold in esports. The key is: Don’t force it. “You don’t actually design for esports. Esports players will go where the fans are. They’ll go where the players are,” he explained. “[Build] for the pro player only, you’re actually building for a different audience, not for a mass market audience.” </p>
<p id="FSP20t"><em>Halo 2</em>’s influence and success can’t just be measured in terms of sales and how it broadened the actual direct gaming culture, though. <em>Halo 2</em>’s impact also presaged how people would start taking the internal worlds of video games and start making entirely new work with them. Streamer and YouTube culture have genetic links to the game. “They took things that worked on PC and made them much more affordable, made them much more mass market, and here was a game that you could play and you could buy a console and you didn’t have to worry about like how to set up a network,” recalled Burnie Burns. He is the cofounder of media company Rooster Teeth and its signature show <em>Red vs. Blue</em>, an animated comedy made directly in <em>Halo</em> and its sequels by recording people playing it in comedic ways and then recording dialogue over the footage. Burns was a journalist and video producer when the first installment of the franchise was released in 2001. By the time <em>Halo 2 </em>came out, he’d founded Rooster Teeth and was working on his show full time. </p>
<p id="5ujHgQ"><em>Red vs. Blue</em> is still in production. Its 17th season wrapped up in May 2019. Looking back, Burns credits <em>Red vs. Blue</em>’s audience explosion to the fact that the show came out exactly 18 months after the release of <em>Halo</em> and 18 months before the release of <em>Halo 2</em>; he was riding the wave of that growing audience. When <em>Halo 2</em> finally came out, he discovered that Bungie was starting to recognize that people were using the game together even beyond store and competition. <em>Red vs. Blue</em> was built out of <em>Halo</em>. The characters, the settings, the <em>Looney Tunes</em>–style sight gags of a character blowing up and falling on their face—all of it was “shot” in the game itself. But it wasn’t necessarily a <em>Halo</em> show. It had its own characters, its own mythology, and its own rhythm that was distinct from the game itself. Burns’s creation took Bungie’s game and made something entirely new with it. <em>Halo 2</em>, in turn, reflected an understanding among its creators that this was one more way people would start playing with their work, and they were giving tools to the audience to make their own fun.</p>
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<cite>Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Two teenageers compete during the Major League Gaming Pro Circuit event June 8, 2007 at the Meadowlands Expo Center in East Rutherford, New Jersey. </figcaption>
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<p id="n8ja7E">“You could see the beginnings of it in <em>Halo 2</em> because they started adding features that had no purpose for playing the game whatsoever, like dropping the weapon,” Burns said. Pressing down on the D-pad, that little cross that’s come standard on almost every controller since the mid-1980s, would let your character in <em>Halo 2</em> lower their weapon to their side. It let the character model look just a little bit more relaxed, a little more at ease. The pose doesn’t benefit you in any way in the game; you can’t lull people you’re playing with into a false sense of security or something. The pose is there purely for storytelling potential, and it was just one of many little changes that made Rooster Teeth’s work richer, more detailed, and easier to craft. “Those little tools to help you shoot things were revolutionary and I think those are what led to theater modes,” Burns said. “Theater Mode is such an important part of the <em>Halo</em> franchise. That it had this incredibly robust replay engine where you can replay your games. The ability to replay didn’t exist and <em>Halo</em> had it seven to 10 years before anybody else was doing it.”</p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="3PgpRp"><em>Halo 2</em>’s roots run both wide and deep: It planted the seeds for professional esports athletes and content creators, formalized infrastructure for playing games online, and fueled social games in the wild that froth people up to the point that they’re willing to answer a pay phone in a tropical storm. But it is also, occasionally, ugly. There was no shortage of pointless bickering and hateful trolling on the internet before 2004, but the roots of the omnipresent bellyaching that is synonymous with the gaming industry also sprang from <em>Halo 2</em>’s soil. Some people, naturally, didn’t like the game. What was different was how it manifested. Today it’s not uncommon for <a href="https://www.marketwatch.com/story/developer-gets-death-threats-from-fans-annoyed-with-new-star-wars-videogame-2017-11-13">game developers to get death threats</a> <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2012/04/23/game-developers-get-a-lot-of-death-threats/">after putting a game out in the wild</a>. Bungie saw someone register the domain Halo2Sucks.com within a few weeks of release. (It’s still up, with a fresh copyright no less.) </p>
<p id="fXaIzE">“It was my first experience of negative community,” O’Connor said. “People complain about stuff. That wasn’t unusual, but it was my first glimpse at organized and miserable bastards whose passion is for complaining about a thing.” What the team saw was that the more the community expanded online, and the more they felt they had direct access to the creators of the game themselves, the angrier that community seemed to become. It wasn’t necessarily that everyone was dissatisfied—far from it. It was that the loudest voices tended to be the most negative ones, a familiar ratio for anyone who’s spent any time on Twitter this decade. </p>
<p id="vGLGWi">“It’s a poop-in-the-swimming-pool proportion,” O’Connor said, utilizing the elegant language of <em>Caddyshack</em> to embody the impact of internet haters. “Somebody leaves a normal-sized dump at the far corner of an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Well, it doesn’t matter that that’s a vanishing percentage of the volume of the pool. So you end up realizing that these loud, negative voices aren’t representative.”</p>
<p id="ggTFQh">In the case of <em>Halo 2</em>, the negativity around the game—e.g., <a href="https://www.bungie.net/en/Forums/Post/191524">accusations that the story was truncated</a>—fueled Bungie’s development of <em>Halo 3</em>,<em> </em>which followed on the Xbox 360 three years later. <em>Halo 3</em> raked in $170 million in its first 24 hours alone, going on to sell 14.5 million copies and breaking the sales record set by its predecessor. The series moved on, Bungie left Microsoft to establish its successful <em>Destiny</em> franchise, and O’Connor and other veterans established 343 Industries to keep the series running.<em> Halo 2</em>’s records have all been eclipsed at this point even though the game still, even now, has a community of players. (“It’s definitely still there,” said Jarrard of the <em>Halo 2</em> scene. “It’s smaller of course than it used to be. Some of these communities have just never moved on.”) But its matchmaking, its approach to bringing people in, its controls, the standards for pro competition it established, and its philosophy on communal world building as reflected in things like <em>Red vs. Blue </em>and <em>I Love Bees</em> all still represent best practices for everyone making things for other people to play. When you see some seventh grader posting a TikTok recapping their <em>Fortnite</em> match from the night before, the moment’s rooted in Bungie’s stab at making a cultural event. Why do all of <em>Halo 2</em>’s parts still work in modern engines?</p>
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<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/jwwPMZGpinPF0W6kuCYyvuoDYkk=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19365249/GettyImages_535726982.jpg">
<cite>Photo by Stephane Cardinale/Corbis via Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Benjamin, Junior and Xavier from the TV show ‘Queer as Folk’ attend the launching of ‘Halo 2’ in Paris.</figcaption>
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<p id="W8X8Oj">“Because they work, right?” Hoberman said. “If they don’t work, someone’s going to invent a better mousetrap. But the reality is a lot of systems I developed, they still hold up today because they work. Why are we still driving cars that work off of exploding gasoline in a confined space?”</p>
<p id="6ls9cp">It seems impossible in 2019 for a game to completely upend its medium like <em>Halo 2</em> did back in 2004. People are too ensconced in an avalanche of media and of choices for something like it to feel so huge and for its affect to be so far-reaching. “A cultural event today is defined by a much smaller group of people,” Elan Lee replied when asked if something like <em>Halo 2 </em>could happen again. How do you make something for everyone when everyone is siloed off into little pockets of their own curated entertainment? “I think that that’s going to be almost impossible for original works,” Burns said. “People who bankroll those are going to rely more heavily on adaptive projects. It’s just the way the world works. So we’re not going to have the <em>Halo 2</em>, we’re not going to have an <em>Empire Strikes Back</em> again for a while.” </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="yCahyO">When it happens, though, when we finally see the next <em>Halo 2</em>, the thing that lands and changes the very landscape it touches, it will succeed for the exact same reason <em>Halo 2</em> did: It will be something shared.</p>
<p id="hszmdB"><a href="https://twitter.com/ajohnagnello"><em>Anthony John Agnello</em></a><em> is a writer and editor living in Ithaca, New York, who covers video games, human beings, and climate change. His work has appeared in </em>The A.V. Club<em>,</em> Engadget<em>,</em> <em>and other publications.</em></p>
https://www.theringer.com/2019/11/11/20958715/halo-2-anniversary-first-person-shooter-xbox-master-chief-history-i-love-beesAnthony John Agnello2019-08-30T06:30:00-04:002019-08-30T06:30:00-04:00The Oral History of ‘Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater’
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<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Va2XhviMGD7Uo0pdbwWy5MIfJhc=/608x0:3808x2400/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/65141437/tonyhawk_final.0.jpg" />
<figcaption><a class="ql-link" href="http://www.bartlettstudio.com" target="_blank">Jonathan Bartlett</a></figcaption>
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<p>As the legendary skateboarding video game turns 20, its creators and Mr. 900 himself reflect on its creation, legacy, and killer soundtrack</p> <p id="fHh4c4"><em>Editor’s note, Friday, September 4, 2020: The remasters of the first two </em>Tony Hawk’s Pro Skaters<em> arrive on Friday, 21 years after the initial installment’s debut. To mark the occasion, we’re revisiting last year’s oral history of the first </em>Tony Hawk<em> game, featuring interviews with the team behind its creation, contributors to its soundtrack, and Tony Hawk himself. So before you break out your nosegrinds and ollies, re-live how the classic series came to be.</em></p>
<hr class="p-entry-hr" id="dpLzIj">
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="lMy4MQ">“Skateboarding is not a crime.” As a slogan in 2019, it’s antiquated to the point of hilarity. Who in the hell would be threatened by skateboarding? Maybe your dad, worried you won’t hang out with him at the park anymore so he can show off his mild ollie skills while wearing a Pavement shirt. Two decades ago, though, record store windows, bathroom stalls in dank punk clubs, and the bumpers of weary Toyota Corollas bore that slogan with utter seriousness and conviction. Skating was no joke in 1999. Good news for Tony Hawk.</p>
<p id="0wRdry">By the end of the ’90s, Hawk had already been skating professionally for the better part of two decades. He’d seen an entire incarnation of skate culture rise and fall through the ’80s, watching Nash wide boards and vertical ramp competitions fade even as boarders like Rodeny Mullen invented new tricks that would define the era that would make Hawk an international star. The street skating world that replaced it felt raw and sexy, a way of life rather than a sport. Fuzzed-out homemade VHS tapes showed people doing impossibly dangerous, funny tricks tracked to shredded, powerful tunes; as the ’90s bloomed, skating found a new soul and a far bigger stage.</p>
<p id="QxVwLj">Skate video games cut a similar line during those years. In Hawk’s early years, skate games were plentiful and beloved by arcade rats. Atari’s legendary <em>720 Degrees</em>, with its blocky, primary-colored suburban playground, was 1986 incarnated, devouring people’s quarters after luring them in with its signature boombox cabinet. <em>Skate or Die</em> took that setting into B-movie territory, with Mohawked skaters pummeling each other with <em>American Gladiators</em>–style jousting staffs in dirty, emptied swimming pools. </p>
<p id="exwluB">As ’80s big-air skating withered and toughened into the spiked righteousness of street skating, though, skate video games became relics of the past. It wasn’t until skating and Tony Hawk himself reached a perfect moment at the end of the following decade—when skating felt perfectly balanced between counterculture cool and mainstream ubiquity—that skate games returned. <em>Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater</em> wasn’t just a skate game when it came out 20 years ago Saturday. It was a phenomenon, a work that, as Hawk himself explains, simultaneously ignited his career and overshadowed it.</p>
<p id="BCaW4Y">And it happened almost entirely by accident. Both the game’s creators at the now-defunct studio Neversoft and its producers at Activision knew when they started making <em>Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater</em> that they were producing something magical, infused with the same soul as the culture fueling it. They got there only by almost going broke and trying to fix a wreck of a Bruce Willis game first.</p>
<h3 id="3ThXFt">1. Bruce Willis’s Deck</h3>
<p id="HLxxXO"><em>Developer Neversoft was on the brink of closure in 1998. Activision, a storied but at the time faded publisher founded by Atari developers in the 1980s, had to finally finish a disintegrating project called </em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalypse_(video_game)">Apocalypse</a>, <em>a game in which Bruce Willis would follow you around, helping you blow up bad guys and shouting inane action movie quips. When the two companies teamed up, they retrofitted one of Neversoft’s unfinished projects into a new version of </em>Apocalypse<em>,</em> <em>which also became the testing ground for an ambitious skateboarding game. Before </em>Tony Hawk<em>, there was John McClane’s Pro Skater.</em></p>
<p id="bPCmUc"><strong>Mick West (Neversoft cofounder, lead programmer of </strong><em><strong>Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater</strong></em><strong>): </strong>We ran out of money working on a game called <em>Big Guns</em> for Sony. They kept changing what the game was and eventually canceled. Activision was a half-hour drive away. Turned out that they needed somebody to finish off <em>Apocalypse</em>. </p>
<p id="fbHSdZ"><strong>David Stohl (producer of </strong><em><strong>Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater</strong></em><strong>, currently EVP, head of </strong><em><strong>Call of Duty </strong></em><strong>development at Activision):</strong> I was brought in to help finish <em>Apocalypse</em>. It was an ambitious project. Bruce Willis was your buddy. I ended up meeting [Neversoft cofounder] Joel Jewett in late ’97 just randomly. And that’s where it started.</p>
<p id="dho3Zz"><strong>Scott Pease (creative executive on </strong><em><strong>Apocalypse</strong></em><strong>, producer of </strong><em><strong>Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater</strong></em><strong>): </strong>Activision had this deal with Bruce Willis. It had to get done. Neversoft picked up those pieces and just jammed together a game in nine months, and that was awesome. </p>
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang"><aside id="r6vKCv"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"1998: The Best Year Ever for Video Games ","url":"https://www.theringer.com/2018/8/29/17795406/1998-the-best-year-ever-for-video-games"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="Nx1Rql"><strong>West: </strong>We showed them our prototype of <em>Big Guns</em> and it was just like, “Oh, we’ll just bolt Bruce Willis’s appearance onto this. We’ll have a fun game!” We pitched that we could do it by Christmas. Based on that they considered us for additional projects, one of which was <em>Tony Hawk</em>.</p>
<p id="1X0Ogx"><strong>Stohl: </strong>Tony Hawk was a name then, but we weren’t into Tony Hawk yet. We were just looking at what was happening in pop culture. There was a stand-up arcade machine across the street from Neversoft called <em>Top Skater</em>. It was in a bowling alley and we’d all go across the street and play that. </p>
<p id="GyDY0v"><strong>Pease: </strong>I grew up skateboarding. I had the world’s worst half-pipe in my backyard that we built completely wrong, like everyone who tries to build a half-pipe. I grew up playing <em>720</em>, <em>California Games</em>,<em> Skate or Die</em>; those were in my blood. To me it was a no-brainer. </p>
<p id="FMH37F"><strong>West: </strong>We took <em>Apocalypse</em> and turned it into a skateboarding game. We took Bruce Willis, stuck him on a skateboard, and just had him skating around rooftops.</p>
<p id="3StaVM"><strong>Silvio Porretta (lead artist on </strong><em><strong>Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater</strong></em><strong>):</strong> Scott Pease, he’s the one who really nailed the gameplay. There’s something about him, the way he designs mechanics in a game that’s just flawless and very addictive.</p>
<p id="Z8Z5l0"><strong>Pease: </strong>I quit Activision to go work at Neversoft full time on the game because it was my baby. My welcome-to-Neversoft moment: I’m sure you’ve heard the first incarnation of Neversoft described as a “frat house.” Joel would bring his dog to work. That was Logan, the first dog who would later appear in the <em>Tony Hawk </em>games. One of the first days, Logan walks in the room, looks at me, lifts his leg, and just pisses all down the wall next to me. Just turns around slowly and shuffles out.</p>
<p id="5fObW1"><strong>Chris Rausch (designer, </strong><em><strong>Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater</strong></em><strong>): </strong>Nerf bullets flying everywhere. We were all stuffed in, three people in rooms made for one and a half. It was impossible not to be close to your teammates. Joel built a ramp in his backyard and we’d go have these skate parties at his house, and everybody’s just eating shit all over Joel’s backyard. Drinking beers, trying to figure out what this is we’re trying to capture on screen.</p>
<p id="wjeMAr"><strong>Porretta: </strong>Some of the designers were doing crazy shit. “Oh, let’s put a skater up here and he’s smoking weed. He’s getting high and then he starts to skate like crazy fucking shit!” There was no logic. We were just a bunch of kids having fun. Mick was the most professional and responsible person in the room. It’s kind of incredible that we were able to put this game together.</p>
<p id="Jh5BAS"><strong>Rausch: </strong>Mick was the brains. Everything you wanted to get to work he could figure out a way to do it. He’d hacked up a way to make <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameShark">GameShark attachments</a> work as dev kits. So we’re working on retail PlayStations with these GameSharks to build and pass the game through. </p>
<p id="tCPvye"><strong>West: </strong>The trick system evolved over time. In May 1998 we started the prototype and we didn’t actually get the way the scoring worked until November. A long time thrashing around trying to figure out what’s good.</p>
<p id="xDodHk"><strong>Pease: </strong>We never wanted you to accidentally do something you didn’t want to do. Even if that was cool. We wanted it to do exactly what you were telling it to do. When you actually physically push that button and then you get snapped into that rail, it feels like you’re doing something, versus the game kind of playing itself.</p>
<p id="wxcX92"><strong>West: </strong>Just making the skaters roll over the ground is straightforward. But what happens when you go off the half-pipe? You want to make that realistic, but it needed to be fun. This one thing, the jumping in the half-pipe, was a pivotal moment when we got it. That set the whole tone of the game in that just simply skating by itself was fun.</p>
<p id="gL4N47"><strong>Pease: </strong>This meeting’s burned in my mind. Silvio was drawing on the whiteboard, brainstorming cool levels, sort of a live session to come up with themes that we could build around, sketching like a madman. It’s going to have a courtyard, picnic tables, and they’re going to have big stair sets and this and that. Then we had to go and build them.</p>
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<cite>Courtesy Scott Pease</cite>
<figcaption>Original <em>Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater</em> planning sketches prepped by Scott Pease and Silvio Poretta</figcaption>
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<img alt=" " data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/G-wCBsB3FHS4705mcEqHM9E4Hp8=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19138074/TonyHawk2.jpg">
<cite>Courtesy Scott Pease</cite>
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<p id="SDtm0N"><strong>Porretta: </strong>The sketches: That was cool! Mick was doing rough drawings of the level. I redid all the levels on paper. We didn’t have an iPhone to take photos or anything.</p>
<p id="8TiG4V"><strong>Porretta: </strong>I looked at a lot of magazines and that’s what gave me the idea of the user interface and the color scheme. Whatever I create, I like to put a lot of layers and I like very gritty stuff. My approach with <em>Tony Hawk</em> was more street than competition. Going up and down the ramp is completely boring, but on the street doing tricks on rails and steps, that’s cool to me. At the time I was really into two brands: Stussy and Adidas. Adidas isn’t a skate brand but I really wanted to implement it somehow. In one of the title screens of <em>Tony Hawk</em>, I implemented three vertical yellow stripes that are a reference to Adidas.</p>
<p id="9s7y3u"><strong>West: </strong>We really wanted to do real skate culture. The gameplay itself isn’t realistic, grinding along power lines and things like that. But the actual culture aspect of all the graphics, all the graffiti, the decks, the deck art, the fact that we had real skaters in, that stuff we took directly from actual culture.</p>
<h3 id="pFgzBR">2. The Road to the 900</h3>
<p id="582CK3"><em>Neversoft proved with a punchy prototype cobbled together out of the bones of a mediocre action game that its team could deliver a truly special skateboarding game. Activision, however, needed a big name to sell the game. Both the developer and the publisher knew that Tony Hawk would be a perfect fit if they could get him. But Hawk was already talking with the company behind </em>Grand Theft Auto<em> about another boarding game … </em></p>
<p id="lKQWvf"><strong>Tony Hawk:</strong> In ’98, I was enjoying a resurgence with my career because suddenly skating was back in the limelight with the advent of the X Games and street skating. Skateboarding was valid. It just felt much more robust than skating in the ’80s. It was more about the rebellious attitude and the graphics, and no one was really that focused on the physical activity of skating. But people were drawn to the unorthodox approach and daredevil aspects.</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="s6ZtyR"><q>”There was no logic. We were just a bunch of kids having fun. —Silvio Porretta</q></aside></div>
<p id="TEW2Mu"><strong>Pease: </strong>Marketing was adamant that we needed to have a license. Could be <em>Thrasher</em>, could be <em>TransWorld</em>, could be a skater. Everyone knew, just in the gut, that Tony would be the guy if we could get him to do it.</p>
<p id="HkowaZ"><strong>Hawk: </strong>Doing the game, the finances were not motivating me. I grew up playing video games in the ’80s. So for me it was a passion project. I got approached by Rockstar Games and they were working on a skate game. I saw a short glimpse of what they were working on and I was close to working with them. But something about it didn’t feel as intuitive as I had hoped. They were very focused on the hardcore skate crowd. Right around that time when I was getting close to signing a deal with them, Activision called.</p>
<p id="mTDd7z"><strong>Pease: </strong>So they set up a meeting. We have that demo ready to go and then I had a trick list. Tony shows up and he’s like in cargo pants and a tee shirt, total skater garb. They walk him into the boardroom and it’s just everybody in suits. The first thing they hit him with is the full-on PowerPoint presentation. “Skateboarding is growing at a phenomenal rate!” They’re going through revenue and projections and it just goes on and on and on. I’m looking at Tony across the table and I just see him sinking in his chair like, “Oh god …” Then finally at the very end of the meeting I get to put the trick list in his hand and he’s like, “Oh, this is cool. Yeah! I got some ideas for the rest.” He’s starting to get it. Then we wheel in the old-school TV cart with a dev PlayStation and we booted up. Tony got to sit there and play that demo live. He’s totally into it. </p>
<p id="tsu2w6"><strong>Hawk: </strong>They presented me with their engine that did have Bruce Willis as a character and just a few basic tricks. I think it had an ollie and a kickflip; you could do 180s. Something about it felt right and I can’t explain it. I just knew that this was more fun to play, and with my experience, my resources, I could make this something that represented skating authentically. There wasn’t a bidding war—I signed off with them almost immediately. </p>
<p id="iGrjVM"><strong>Pease: </strong>We didn’t hear anything for two months! It was this whole negotiation. </p>
<p id="vZzt3j"><strong>Hawk: </strong>There were so many subtleties to go over, the way that tricks were triggered and the way they looked. I would say this needs to flip faster, this needs to look more pointed like a melon grab. Little subtleties like that to reflect current skating. </p>
<p id="xxRkmB"><strong>Pease: </strong>Motion capture was mostly a marketing thing. “We need the footage of Tony in the suit to say there’s mocap to make the whole story more interesting!” We didn’t need the mocap. But we went ahead and did the shoot and put Tony through the paces. He busted his ass off giving us all kinds of different tricks. He bailed on those ping-pong balls! It was fantastic to look at it on the computer and use it for reference, but it was way too late for us to get that data into that game. </p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="k1JKo5"><q>“The finances were not motivating me. I grew up playing video games in the ’80s. So for me it was a passion project.” —Tony Hawk </q></aside></div>
<p id="hFK7ch"><strong>Stohl: </strong>It’s not genius for me to say, “Hey, we should have Tony Hawk in our game.” He was the biggest name that I grew up with in skating. But Tony was driving, saying we need Elissa Steamer, Kareem Campbell, Bob Burnquist, Andrew Reynolds, all these people that we got for the game. </p>
<p id="ILiFok"><strong>Hawk: </strong>The roster came from me. That first crew represented the different styles of skating, the guys who were really pushing the limits and to a certain extent the diversity. Looking back, obviously it was super skewed. There’s only one girl. But at the same time, that was the state of skateboarding—the ratio of male to female was so offset. Elissa was truly the best choice in terms of the best street skater. Even with Kareem representing African Americans … that ratio is way more equal in skating now. At the time it wasn’t, and a lot of people have told me that that’s what got them into skating. They saw Kareem in the game and they were like, “Oh, it’s not just a white-boy sport.” I actually heard it from Pharrell Williams. He was telling me about growing up in Virginia, being a skater, and how it was just not cool in his region and his crew. He said after the video game came out, it was just normalized.</p>
<h3 id="B83B0h">3. Video Games’ Greatest Mixtape</h3>
<p id="HlDSQi">Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater<em> was coming together, a feat of both technical grace and serendipity not unlike the best skate tricks. Best of all, it was turning out to be as legitimately cool as the culture it captured. Every legendary skate video needed a killer soundtrack, though. Everyone on the team started naming the perfect tunes for the game: skate staples like Dead Kennedys’ “Police Truck,” brutal underground cuts like Unsane’s “Committed,” and even Buzzbin-ready hits like Goldfinger’s “Superman.”</em></p>
<p id="LJYQ00"><strong>Stohl: </strong>Tony was already starting to cross over, but we also had these kind of authentic street and speed skaters. It was better that we had that and that we had the music that was so relevant to skating.</p>
<p id="12187Q"><strong>Rausch: </strong>My era in skateboarding was mid-’80s, when it was all like skate punk. The Adolescents and Dead Kennedys. I started bringing in mixtapes, we started pulling stuff from Napster, even—“These are the kind of bands we want to go get.” And at the time licensed music in games wasn’t really like that.</p>
<p id="il7UUt"><strong>Les Claypool (cofounder of Primus): </strong>[Guitarist] Larry LaLonde was our big skater. Primus shows were notorious for being very energetic, lots of moshing and stage diving, and I think it just appealed to that aggressive and somewhat rebellious sense of the skate community. We had a lot of friends that were skaters, so whenever any of these opportunities to be a part any of that stuff, we would just let them use the stuff, because we thought it was a cool association to have our music be a part of these things. It was always entertaining to hear us jangling away behind these guys as they’re bouncing off of walls and railings and whatnot.</p>
<div id="iDRMEX"><div style="left: 0; width: 100%; height: 0; position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%;"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZRxAWl2bZBM?rel=0" style="border: 0; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; position: absolute;" allowfullscreen="" scrolling="no" allow="encrypted-media; accelerometer; gyroscope; picture-in-picture"></iframe></div></div>
<p id="dpXY4e"><strong>Pease: </strong>The way I remember it was like, let’s just let everybody contribute what you think would be great tracks. When Tony got wind of it he contributed as well. They had to be good tracks to skate to, right? </p>
<p id="qaHEMZ"><strong>Rausch: </strong>The soundtrack was going to be a part of the personality. I had been working with a guy named Jeff Gordon and he was making music videos, working with groups like Goldfinger at the time, but also all these other kinds of local up-and-comers. And so I started throwing those bands in there too. REO Speedealer was one. At the time they were getting sued by, obviously, REO Speedwagon. So the band you got on the <em>Tony</em> <em>Hawk</em> soundtrack was Speedealer because, lo and behold, REO Speedealer wasn’t going to fly.</p>
<p id="3JM27T"><strong>Porretta: </strong>My ex-wife was working with the manager of Slayer at the time. She got Suicidal Tendencies to put music in the game. We looked at what was cool because for us it was important to be cool before anything.</p>
<p id="v9gyIW"><strong>Claypool: </strong>You hear a sound or a song and it brings you back to a time in your life. Hopefully it’s a positive time of your life, but it’s the soundtrack to your existence on the planet. These things, these tunes, these video games, the Tony Hawk game. I’ve had so many people over the years comment to me about how they had “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBQ2305fLeA">Jerry Was a Race Car Driver</a>” driven into their brain playing <em>Tony Hawk Pro Skater</em>. That’s an amazing thing.</p>
<h3 id="cpzSE4">4. The Game</h3>
<p id="JzdtWm"><em>Tony Hawk and Neversoft thought they’d made something magical, but it wasn’t until people outside the creative circle started playing the game that they realized what a monster they had on their hands. By mid-summer 1999, a single-level demo of the game was already transfixing actual pro skaters. It became “The Game” to the whole community. When the full game came out, it shredded Activision’s sales expectations and grew into a cultural sensation.</em></p>
<p id="ef6ftU"><strong>Hawk: </strong>Right before the release I had pirated a few copies of the beta for some friends who are into video games but also skated. They just started calling it “The Game.” That’s what it became known as in the skate community. “Have you played The Game? Have you seen The Game?!” Then even closer to release Activision offered me a buyout of future royalties, basically like if I wanted cash right now. And I didn’t. I wasn’t that savvy in business. I didn’t really know. But at the same time I was doing pretty well. I told them to their face, I don’t need the money right now. I’m happy to see what happens with this and let it ride.</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="XEEOhf"><q>“They saw Kareem [Campbell] in the game and they were like, “Oh, it’s not just a white-boy sport.” —Tony Hawke</q></aside></div>
<p id="4Fahgd"><strong>Stohl: </strong>We were at the Action Sports Retailers show and I was walking around the floor approaching all the street skater people Tony and I had agreed to reach out to. You could just tell. Every game person will tell you once you put your game in somebody’s hands for the first time and let them just do whatever it’s so cringey. So hard. But when we got to show the game at the Action Sports Retailers show, it was hugely successful and popular and everyone thought it was really fun. Everybody was completely surprised. It wasn’t what they thought. We were like, “We need to get this into people’s hands. We need to show them this.” </p>
<div id="i1Oqu4"><div style="left: 0; width: 100%; height: 0; position: relative; padding-bottom: 75%;"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/e4hFnlEkIcY?rel=0" style="border: 0; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; position: absolute;" allowfullscreen="" scrolling="no" allow="encrypted-media; accelerometer; gyroscope; picture-in-picture"></iframe></div></div>
<p id="Dim0Fi"><strong>Ralph D’Amato (associate producer on </strong><em><strong>Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater</strong></em><strong>): </strong>I was tasked with getting focus testers. I did things like putting up flyers at high schools, which would probably get you arrested today.</p>
<p id="DxamQI"><strong>Rausch: </strong>Joel would go out at night to skate parks. He would wheel a TV over to a bunch of kids in the parking lot: Play this, check it out, and tell me what you think. They would go nuts. The TV didn’t survive. He dumped it on the pavement. But everybody we would give it to had the same kind of reaction. Sony wanted to put it on their Jam Pack, this demo disc they were putting in their magazines. That exploded. Even on bulletin boards, just the fledgling internet: The only thing people were talking about was the <em>Tony Hawk</em> demo.</p>
<p id="zPmZeD"><strong>D’Amato: </strong>It was wave after wave of kid that didn’t want to leave. They wanted to keep playing the game. It was also a little bit scary because we weren’t getting much in the way of criticism.</p>
<p id="OJjEk0"><strong>Stohl: </strong>When we started we didn’t have huge expectations. You don’t plan for something to be <em>Pro Skater</em> from a performance point of view. You would never do that in business. It’s irresponsible. We thought we would do pretty well. I’ve watched a million curves over the years of launch and unit sales. You often see a big uptake at launch from preorders and stuff like that. And then it comes off a bit and then it maybe builds in the holiday. But that game never dropped. It never slowed. So it launched well, but it kept growing. It just kept selling and selling. </p>
<p id="AIdHg5"><strong>Mat Piscatella (executive director, games, The NPD Group): </strong><em>Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater</em> is a wild game from a sales perspective. It started out a bit slow. It was the no. 31 best-selling game of 1999, selling right around 800,000 units. It was outsold that year by games like <em>Wheel of Fortune</em>, <em>Ready 2 Rumble Boxing</em>,<em> </em>and <em>A Bug’s Life</em>. However, it sold over 5 million units lifetime, and was the second-highest-selling game among 1999 releases over time, second only to <em>Pokemon Yellow</em>. And, of course, it created one of the biggest franchises in video game history.</p>
<p id="eYiJQR"><strong>Pease: </strong>I was there in the beginning on the Activision side. I saw that we had to sell 250,000 units. If we do that, we’ll make our money back, we’ll make Activision a profit, and we’ll probably get to make <em>Tony Hawk 2</em>. All I wanted to do was for this to be successful enough so that we can make the next one. Because it was so fun to make. Then it just kept growing. I did not foresee that happening at all. And obviously some of that was out of our control. It was like a whole bunch of different forces coming together in this magic way. Tony hitting the 900 at the X Games. Holy shit.</p>
<div id="U8YnTA"><div style="left: 0; width: 100%; height: 0; position: relative; padding-bottom: 75%;"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/UnDgQUW1CO0?rel=0" style="border: 0; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; position: absolute;" allowfullscreen="" scrolling="no" allow="encrypted-media; accelerometer; gyroscope; picture-in-picture"></iframe></div></div>
<p id="CdzFyf"><strong>Hawk: </strong>We had no intention of putting 900s in the game before that. You could spin in the air in the game and it would kill your rotations and you can make that into a 900, but that wasn’t the signature move itself. </p>
<p id="fjdp74"><strong>Simeon Bartholomew (cofounder of Birdman or the Unexpected Virtue of a Tony Hawk Pro Skater Cover Band, which exclusively plays music from the game):</strong> I played it at a friend’s place first. I never had a PlayStation, I was a Nintendo kid. His name was Tony and I would always go to his house every morning and we would play it before school. I would always tell my mom that we had extra classes on Friday or whatever just so I could have the excuse to leave early. For me was just the ultimate, one of the very first games in my childhood that was free. There’s no boundaries. You can go wherever you want and do whatever you want. The tricks are up to you. The points are up to you, the combos that you want to do to collect all the things, the part that you choose is up to you. I was a bit physically disabled and I couldn’t ride skateboards. But [the game] just had this ability to let me do whatever I want.</p>
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<a href="https://www.facebook.com/BirdmanTHPS/videos/1365139393591256/">Bodyjar - Not the Same (Kickflip)</a><p>ONE OF OUR MANY Oktoberwest HIGHLIGHTS FROM SUNDAY - smashing out Bodyjar's "Not The Same" with Lindsay McDougall shredding a couple of MOTHERKICKFLIPPING SOLOS ONSTAGE WTH US!
OH ALSO HEY MELBOURNE - SEE YOU AT PAX Australia ON THE 28TH OF OCTOBER.
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<p id="IFKwsO"><strong>Josh Tsui (filmmaker, cofounder of Robomodo, the studio behind </strong><em><strong>Tony Hawk’s Ride</strong></em><strong>): </strong>One of the things about those early Tony Hawk games that really resonated with me, besides just the aesthetics of it, was that they were very fast-paced. They’re very similar to arcade games. I’m an arcade rat at heart. It showed that you can make games for a home console that are larger in scope but can still be fast-paced. It doesn’t have to have a 40-hour story. It had a great pickup-and-play attitude toward it.</p>
<p id="qBWC9Z"><strong>Bartholomew: </strong>Three months after forming the band, we were headlining this small stage at this festival. The response went far beyond what I thought we were going to achieve. I thought we were going to be the midday dance. The gimmick band that’s funny. But no, here we were closing a small stage and we have like 600, 800 people in front of us just like erupting, almost caving in the dance floor. <em>Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater </em>was kind of like having the older brothers that I never had to curate music taste. The moment I got into <em>Tony Hawk</em>, I was just like, “Oh my God, I love punk music and I love everything here.”</p>
<h3 id="oXDUMr">5. “I Never Thought That Would Be Possible”</h3>
<p id="VFubff"><em>Looking back on that first game, the people responsible for </em>Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater<em> are wistful and still dumbfounded, delightedly so, at how much people adored their work. While its creators are grateful for the game’s legacy, they also miss the freedom they had to create so freely. And Tony Hawk himself remains astounded by how the world embraced skating in its wake.</em></p>
<p id="1pPohp"><strong>West: </strong>We pioneered certain types of gameplay—the tricks, in particular, and tying in real-world culture into a game was something new. I think because it was such a fun, popular game, it just pushed things along a big step rather than a revolution.</p>
<p id="Pf0oCy"><strong>Stohl: </strong>I’ve worked at seven different versions of Activision over 24 years. I’ve watched the company evolve, the industry evolve, the game content evolve, the players evolve. Back then it was like, “OK, let’s make the PlayStation version for North America. OK, we got that done.” Then once we were launched, we were done. You couldn’t even update on the console back then. There was no patching. Making a game was so different then. It was so nice. </p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="yh5Wrl"><q>“There’s no boundaries. You can go wherever you want and do whatever you want.” —Simeon Bartholomew </q></aside></div>
<p id="Hc4j2D"><strong>Porretta: </strong>The industry has changed so much. It’s not creative anymore. Everything is controlled. When I started, I was doing everything in game development, from design to animations to sketches. Today everyone has a specific role and you cannot deviate from that role. Games now are all about making money. </p>
<p id="Ppvbpv"><strong>Pease: </strong>As you go through your career you don’t even realize how awesome those moments were back then. To have a team like that where everybody’s into it, everybody’s having fun, everyone’s pulling in the same direction—you’re just getting to make the thing that you want to make. It’s super rare. I don’t think anybody realized it at the time. </p>
<p id="UQcIfC"><strong>Rausch: </strong>It may very well be the most important thing I ever do in my whole career. And hopefully that’s gonna last a really long time. I started a studio, I’ve done all these other things. I’ve worked on big license titles and big games, but I’ve never been a part of something like that. I’m a huge <em>Star Wars</em> fan. As a kid that was the thing that drove my imagination and I credit it with making me want to go into creative fields. People still constantly say, “Oh my god, I can’t believe you worked on <em>Tony Hawk</em>.” It still seems surreal. We worked with an animator just recently at Nicalis and he was a huge <em>Tony Hawk </em>fan. When he found out, he wanted me to sign something and that’s so foreign to me. It was one of the biggest things he had growing up.</p>
<p id="GYItXN"><strong>Hawk: </strong>Skating is so inclusive and diverse now that you can’t stereotype it. There’s still the hardcore element of skating: people hopping fences, hitting the hand rails, getting tickets from cops, renegade videos, <em>Jackass</em>-style stunts. All that stuff is still there. But it’s equal to the people that are doing it in the designated areas at skate parks and creating content for YouTube and getting big sponsors. Then there’s the Olympic aspect. There are people training to skate for the Olympics. All of those coexist. You can’t just define skating in one certain way anymore.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="0Geozo">Things changed in the sense that there was a fan base for skating that didn’t ride skateboards themselves. My name recognition skyrocketed. I was starting to get recognized everywhere I went. My name became synonymous with something other than myself, which was weird. Skating became something that kids chose to do as easily as they chose to play baseball or basketball. More facilities were available and embraced by city councils and by parents. That was the big shift, really. A whole new generation was starting to skate and understood all of its nuances. I never imagined that growing up that I could talk to someone who doesn’t skate and they’d understand what a kickflip is like. I never thought that would be possible.</p>
<p id="iPuo37"><em>These interviews have been condensed and edited for clarity.</em></p>
<p id="LiRf8Q"><a href="https://twitter.com/ajohnagnello"><em>Anthony John Agnello</em></a><em> is a writer and editor living in Ithaca, New York, who covers video games, human beings, and climate change. His work has appeared in </em>The A.V. Club<em>,</em> Engadget<em>,</em> <em>and other publications. </em></p>
https://www.theringer.com/2019/8/30/20838769/oral-history-tony-hawk-pro-skater-soundtrack-les-claypool-neversoft-activisionAnthony John Agnello