Crowdfunded documentary about the 'Tony Hawk's Pro Skater' series gets brilliant first trailer
Get this funded now
The year was 1999.
British school discos would absolutely go off when the DJ dropped S Club 7, The Rock formed a tag team with Mankind, Star Wars fans were subjected to Jar Jar Binks for the first time, and a little video game series called Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater offered a generation of young people a very good reason not to go outside.
18 years and some 12 games later (not including spin-offs), and a full-length documentary about the series’ incredible history is in development.
Pretending I’m a Superman is being headed up by Ralph D’Amato, a former producer at Neversoft who worked on the first Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater titles.
The film, which has an ambitious but flexible crowdfunding target of $75,000, aims to follow the series from the very beginning and go behind-the-scenes to find out how it became such a global phenomenon.
In the brand new trailer, we see interviews with Rodney Mullen and the Birdman himself, and if the doc goes ahead D’Amato has a lot of the original Neversoft developers on board.
The Tony Hawk games have endured a pretty spectacular fall from grace over the years. The first few entries were unanimously adored; Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 remains the second-highest rated game of all time on Metacritic, with a combined score of 98. The reaction to the most recent game, 2015’s Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5, could not have been more different. In development it had looked like a return to the series’ roots, but widespread glitches, broken physics and bland, uninspired level design made it something of a tragic flop.
Thankfully, it sounds as if Pretending I’m a Superman will be more focused on Hawk in its heyday, when it was all about pop-punk, ridiculous combos and a blatant disregard for private property. Get this thing made.
