Social Science Popular Culture
Right, Down + Circle
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater
- Publisher
- ECW Press
- Initial publish date
- Sep 2023
- Category
- Popular Culture, Skateboarding, Video & Electronic
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781770417168
- Publish Date
- Sep 2023
- List Price
- $19.95
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9781778521973
- Publish Date
- Sep 2023
- List Price
- $9.99
Classroom Resources
Where to buy it
Description
“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.
About the author
Hailing from Lac La Biche, Alberta, a love of skateboarding would take Cole Nowicki to Vancouver, BC’s more hospitable climate. He is the author of Right, Down + Circle (ECW Press, 2023), was a columnist for King Skateboard Magazine, lead writer for the acclaimed documentary series Post Radical, and writes Simple Magic, a weekly newsletter about skateboarding, the internet, and other means of escape. His essays have appeared in The Walrus, Catapult, Vice, Maisonneuve, and more. He’s also the publisher and managing editor of fine. press.
Excerpt: Right, Down + Circle: Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater (by (author) Cole Nowicki)
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.
Editorial Reviews
“Cole Nowicki's 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. Nowicki recounts the cultural alchemy that launched Tony Hawk's Pro Skater to global ubiquity and charts its influence right up to the present day. A wholesome joyride full of delightful trivia.” — Sarah Berman, author of Don’t Call It a Cult
“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
“As one of the people whose life changed forever the first time I picked up a PlayStation controller, Right, Down + Circle perfectly captures how it felt to witness a subculture becoming an inescapable phenomenon. Nowicki deftly follows the trails left by the urethane wheels of skateboarding and how it would change video games, music, and culture as we know it. Written with a familiar and vivid lived experience, Right, Down + Circle charts how Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater changed those of us who felt like outsiders as we tried to find ourselves on the digital and concrete pavements of the streets that raised us.” — Niko Stratis, culture writer
“Cole Nowicki nails the thrill and mystique of playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater — yes, the fun of playing, but also the absolutely serious stuff of providing refuge. This is a tender tribute to a fragile time, a frontside 360 ollie that feels like a hug.” — Elamin Abdelmahmoud, author of Son of Elsewhere
“By turns panoramic and personal, Right, Down + Circle is a sharp, lucid, and vital reminder that the value of any game is how it teaches us and gives us permission to play.” — Kyle Beachy, author of The Most Fun Thing
“It is an easily readable, well-researched and dense history with a personal touch. If you read one book about skateboarding this (next?) year, pick this one.” — Quartersnacks
“The author does a great job of exploring the history of skateboarding and the different maneuvers in simple and easy to understand manner–especially for people who have never skated a day in their lives...while also entwining how playing these video games helped shape who he is today.” — Palmer Library Reviews