An Open Letter To Tony Hawk

Dear mr Hawk,

We have recently had the announcement of your new Tony Hawk Ride game and the new motion based controller that can be used to make the on screen skater perform tricks as you hop, flip and ollie the board in front of your TV.

Tony, what you fail to realize is that “gimmicks” and “novelty” items and ideas like this, in my opinion, take the player AWAY from skateboarding, not towards it. Computer games are about immersion and making the impossible, possible – but there has to be a line drawn in the grip tape somewhere.

We, as skaters, want real skating.
We want real skate spots.
We want realistic tricks (with the option to allow the odd triple backflip to tail grab nose slide across a rooftop – to fakie now and again).
We want real skaters.
We want proper online capabilities with video editing and upload.
We don’t want to have the piss taken out of us by the use of silly comments, violence, skitching, comedy characters or “ollie the bum” type contests.

Skateboarding is our religion – our way of life – a part of our everyday existence and we will only play your games when it rains. So please, make it good. Your future in this industry hinges on this game – I hope you realize this. Since the Skate franchise, the real skaters out there expect more – want more and hope you will deliver more.

I’m sure that the readers of SkaterGeek.com will join me in agreeing that you are one of the most amazing skaters ever – apart from Rodney Mullen and that you, and you alone have taken Skateboarding to a new level worldwide – and a probably responsible for us all picking up a skateboard.

Please Tony – don’t let us down.