I’m thinking, staring at my computer at 3am, that I hope this is some kind of renaissance. AS I have been doing for the last few days – the only video game I have had time for is called Session.

Released only relatively recent, it’s one of many recent skateboarding related affairs. I want to promise there are more of these wood-on-wheels simulators coming, but you’ll have to keep your eyes out for me.

SKATEBOARDING is a videogame thing to me – a person who knows the woeful mix that bones, concrete and high impact speeds make. Never in a million years would I have ever tried to do this, if not for Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. Never the original though, I have more fond memories of Underground. As an instrument of pure fiction for me, that means somewhere right next to me it is the instigator of broken bones and even more broken dreams.

ALI BOULALA was 29 when he killed someone else in a drunk driving incident. His passenger was almost a decade his junior, an up-and-coming skateboarder. I can’t imagine it was anything other than youthful stupidity that put them both in a motorcycle that night, drunk, with no helmets. I imagine when I watch Ali – a guy who was known for being brash and reckless clear gaps that would make me shit my pants, as anything other than young.

The only videogame Ali was in was SKATE, though if you only play videogames you might be forgiven if you don’t know who he is. The truth of it is Skateboarding videogames were only a window to that world if you were willing to go out and buy a deck yourself. So who he was, I remember it mostly from grainy VHS tapes and early you tube videos.

Watching him now is watching Superman die in front of you. He’s been released from prison and come out of the kinds of living comas that drugs can cause I know well. Whatever spark was in those videos is gone. As he laments in a documentary from a few years ago – the warehouse he started skating in in the 90’s is less than ten miles away. After all, starting over can be as easy as going back to where it all began. A powerful reality, mostly proven by works of fiction.

About a dozen people I know in a small town in Arizona have similar stories. Maybe they weren’t professionals or maybe they just got close enough to touch it. Some of them ended in tragic ten-foot drops between steel rails and concrete. A fractured patella. A few were as simple as hitting a ledge the wrong way – a broken femur. Just a handful less than that are the ones who suffered bruised shoulders or fractured wrists – scared.

Every single one of them has gone back and picked up a skateboard sooner or later. It’s hard to imagine but most of this is caused by wanting to collect all of the hidden tapes. Wanting to prove they’re the better skater than Eric Sparrow. At ten years old, or maybe even younger – a videogame is a lens into another world. A game that featured a cast of real-people that wasn’t really meant as fiction.

Tony Hawk could land 720’s like he was sitting down. In the back of a trailer somewhere, a haze of smoke and surrounded by people I didn’t know – people traded tapes. We’d pour over hours and hours of skateboarding footage and pretend to understand it. All of these sessions ended the exact same way. Someone puts a copy of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater in a Playstation. Instead of trying to understand whatever it was they spent hours watching real people do – it’s trying to figure out how to land something while watching a blurry CG approximation of a human being.

Hours later, there was the cacophony of skateboard wheels on concrete. A sound I can still hear in my head now. A holdover from being young I still let myself occasionally get hung-up on. It’s just that one of these days ends in a fractured patella. A broken femur. Bones and blood and concrete, maybe just a little puke.

I watch someone go through the motions of life for a few months – it’s eventually years before any of them gets back on a skateboard. By then, it’s because they really have to love it. Skateboarding is a lot less thrilling in many ways when you’re thirty – but the threat of a broken bone somehow so much more real. Most of the people I watched crash are starting over now.

None of these people are anything close to being Superman. For many of them, maybe Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater was a promise of a broken dream. You don’t get lights and applause when you’re trying to be the best skater in a town where the only park had zero stars as long as it was listed online. That’s the crushing reality they’ve all had to stare down.

In today’s cultural moment, Skateboarding really doesn’t matter. If you had to ask me how I felt about videogames, I would probably say something similar pretty flippantly.
At the back of my mind I’d know videogames made a handful people follow in Ali Boulala’s footsteps, one way or another.