Skate Boardin’, arcade evolutions in Tony Hawk’s footsteps!

No cell phones or implausible Tik Tok antics mimicking dancers we’ll never be, but only adrenaline and extremely dangerous stunts at the skatepark, emulating his majesty Tony Hawk! As my skater friend Luca would say, “certain tricks are pure poetry,” and it is precisely in the name of that on-the-road lyricism that Atari released Skate Boardin’ for its flagship console, in that distant and seminal 1987.

A managing the project’s reins was Absolute Entertainment, one of the many pioneering development companies that, in those post-crisis years (the bleakest moment in the history of video games), fought for attention with ideas, dreams, and visions in pixel form: at the helm of this creative half pipe was none other than David Crane, who rose to prominence in the industry thanks to that masterpiece of reflexes, curses, and exotic settings called Pitfall, a great game, believe me. Skate Boardin’ absolutely had to grab the interest of video game fans with a level of difficulty that was challenging enough. At the same time, Atari knew very well that for a game with such a particular nature, halfway between a sport discipline and the street experience in the style of PaperBoy (if you don’t know what that is, I’ll throw a newspaper in your face!), it was also necessary to do some marketing work, so as to attract real skaters too, a true legion in the United States. 

Impersonating a young troublemaker running late for school, we will face an urban course packed with ramps, tubes, and various obstacles that we will have to use to score as many points as possible: the aim of the game is to reach the school gates within five minutes, helping to rekindle the right amount of anxiety in the player. But be careful: to successfully complete the mission, grandly titled “The Cruise” in the in-game instruction manual (those were the days!), you will have to perform 50 tricks between ramps and tubes.

The literally timeless charm of a title like this is not revealed simply by playing it: inserting the cartridge into the console slot is already an exciting moment in itself, as is the startup screen, with the title standing proudly alongside the graphics that we would rightly call retro today, but which in those years of experimentation represented the best for video game players. The cover of Skate Boardin’ itself, with that tacky guy in sunglasses, Hawaiian shorts, and the skateboard in psychedelic colors about to pull off a boneless right next to a van in the middle of the street, triggers in the user’s eye the forbidden desire to string together tricks in the sunny afternoons of summers devoted to skipping school.

Per farlo, we can also make use of a ride: one of the most iconic maneuvers is what is known in jargon as skitch: in Skate Boardin’, in fact, we will be able to grab a moving vehicle and crouch down to cut through the air in the best possible way. This will literally allow us to breeze through the stages from one area to the next, and then detach and resume our crusade on the road!

Skate Boardin’ is not a modern game, of course: the gameplay is on the edge of minimalism and, by today’s standards, the graphics are certainly a museum piece. However, it is still capable of entertaining anyone who gives it a try; the tricks with the skateboard and the sound effects so wonderfully Eighties make this title a must… without any need to skin your knees anymore.

But, let’s keep this between us, I kind of miss Mercurochrome on scrapes, don’t you?