Right, Down + Circle.: Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater (Pop Classics Series, 12) - Softcover

Nowicki, Cole

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1770417168 ISBN 13: 9781770417168

Verlag: ECW Press,Canada, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

"Right, Down + Circle is a lightning-speed time machine held together with grip tape and wallet chains. It immediately transports to an era of CD collections, ripped band tees, and sibling video game rivalry." -- Sarah Berman, author of Don't Call It a Cult

"A tender tribute to a fragile time, a frontside 360 ollie that feels like a hug." -- Elamin Abdelmahmoud, author of Son of Elsewhere

"With incisive and heartfelt writing, Cole Nowicki unlocks the source code of the massively influential cultural phenomenon that is Tony Hawk's Pro Skater and finds wonderful Easter eggs of meaning within. Even non-skaters will be wowed by this examination of youth, community, risk, and authenticity and gain a new appreciation of skateboarding's massive influence upon our larger culture. This is my new favorite book about skateboarding, which isn't really about skateboarding -- it's about everything." -- Michael Christie, author of the novels Greenwood and If I Fall, If I Die

In 1999, the bestselling video game Tony Hawk's Pro Skater was released, and a new generation was exposed to skateboarding culture and everything it embodied, including its tumultuous history with popularity, outsider status, and rebellion. Kids and adults alike could now spend hours in their own homes 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.

Right, Down + Circle explores how a video game starring the most famous pro skater in the world brought skateboarding 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.

About the Pop Classics Series

Short books that pack a big punch, Pop Classics offer intelligent, fun, and accessible arguments about why a particular pop phenomenon matters.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Cole Nowicki is a Vancouver-based writer, producer, publisher, and lifelong skateboarder. He was a columnist for King Skateboard Magazine, lead writer for the acclaimed skateboarding documentary series Post Radical, and writes the skateboarding and pop-culture newsletter Simple Magic. His freelance work has appeared in The Walrus, Vice, Maisonneuve, and more.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Since the beginning of time, a dynamic has existed among siblings playing video games. Whether they were in an arcade, had their noses pressed to an old cathode-ray tube TV screen or found themselves huddled over the glowing rectangle of a smartphone, the older sibling has always, always, hogged that shit. Perhaps not all older siblings were guilty of this: the bogarting of quarters, that unbreakable grip on a greasy Super Nintendo controller, the claim that the phone is theirs and they don’t have to let you play, you idiot. But my older brother James certainly did.

For hours I’d sit in the basement of our childhood home, forced to watch as he and his friend Nathan mashed buttons on the PlayStation controller. Tomb Raider, Gex, 1080° Snowboarding—all games I initially witnessed more than played. Only when the two went outside to smoke the cigarettes that my brother would steal from our mother would I get my opportunity.

As we moved into the late ‘90s, James and Nathan, now in high school and in search of an identity to call their own, found a new hobby, something to cling to while floating through the cruel, confusing morass of their teenage years: skateboarding. Almost immediately, the width of their pant legs ballooned, swallowing their skinny pale legs. The summer afternoons that once took place in the basement were now spent rolling around the driveway, chain wallets glinting in the sun, narrated by a new language I had no grasp of: ollies, kickflips, backside tailslides. It was all Latin to me. To most younger siblings, your older sibling’s interests are highly contagious. So, it wasn’t long before I put down the PlayStation controller—which, in a revelation, I’d begun to have almost unfettered access to—and began to go outside to watch Nathan and my brother try to calculate the taxing physics behind the ollie.

At first, I didn’t get it. All they did was fall, pant legs parachuting but not lessening the impact of their pimpled teenage skin on the concrete. I tried riding their skateboards in a few wobbly attempts but was eventually told to get your own, dumbass. Soon, I was back inside, proceeding to get lost in a universe of different video games, from the childlike benevolence of Croc to the murderous vampire lore of Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain. It was bliss. However, just a short few weeks later, Nathan and my brother returned to the basement. Smelling now of cigarettes and weed, they promptly evicted me from the PlayStation and popped in a new game.

The startup screen commenced. Suddenly, a gravity-defying skateboarder appeared, somehow riding upside down in a large wooden loop that looked like the Hot Wheels track I had packed away in the closet. As I struggled to understand what was happening, a name assembled itself from a tangle of silver shards on the screen in front of me: Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: ECW Press,Canada
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1770417168
• ISBN 13: 9781770417168
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 119
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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