Warning: this post is incredibly self indulgent
On April 19th, 2018, I shared this image in a tweet. The idea was that Tony Hawk had been sharing a lot of strange interactions he had experienced in real life, often where he would be somewhat recognised but not entirely. There was a bit of an odd humour about it, where Tony Hawk is undeniably the most famous skateboarder in the world, but at the same time he Kinda Just Looks Like a Guy, You Know? So I thought it would be funny to make a faux cover for a Tony Hawk game that took place in 2018 rather than the height of his popularity, a game about being Tony Hawk when he's Off The Board.
One thing you should probably know about me, is that I am one to put a weirdly high amount of effort into silly jokes like this. A lot of care and consideration was put into designing the box art for Tony Hawk's Existential Nightmare. The structure of the box was naturally based upon the box for Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2, with a lot of small jokes that are riffing off of specific elements from the original art. Where the THPS2 box lists the featured skaters in the game in a circle around Tony, I list the various internal demons that Tony must contend against in THEN.
Something that I don't think anyone has ever naturally discerned due to a lack of clarity in the image, but the Tony Hawk Logo which normally has a silhouette of Tony doing a trick was replaced with Rodin's The Thinker. I wish it was a little more obvious in the final image, but nothing's ever perfect.
The part I've always been the most proud of was presenting the quotes of people interacting with Tony in his day to day life as if they were Pull Quotes from video game magazine reviews. That's comedy baby! A year down the line someone takes it into their own hands to correct the grammatical error on the cover, where in one of the quotes, "Who's" had been used in place of the possessive "Whose".
In reality, what happened was that Tony made the typo in his original tweet, and I reproduced the typo onto the box art. Old video game box arts had graphical errors and typos all the time, and I thought it would be funny and fitting to keep the mistake in.
The deepest darkest secret on the construction of this image however, is when I constructed the cover, the still I had used of Tony Hawk ended well before the bottom of the box art. I crudely approximated the rest of Tony's body using the brush tool in Photoshop with no attempt to create photorealism. However, no one has seemingly ever noticed because of the logo masking the crudest parts of the body and drawing attention away, so I suppose I got away with it.
Anyway, it got kinda popular on twitter.
As the old adage goes, "Wow! This One is Doing Numbers!" I'm glad a funny little image I made resonated with people. Fun stuff. Except, things don't end here. From this point, Tony Hawk's Existential Nightmare ends up having a life of its own.
Tony Hawk's Existential Nightmare gets shared to just about every image macro and meme reposting website around, ifunny, Know Your Meme, Reddit, you name it. Naturally, remixes started appearing. The "game" gets "ported" to modern platforms, not once, but twice. An actual indie game gets made and published onto itch.io. The Podcast I listened to every single day taking the bus into college riffs some jokes off of it.
But truly the place THEN got a new life is in its returning to where it was born, Twitter. As the image got shared and passed around, it made its way back to the Man himself, with people sharing Tony Hawk the image in his mentions. Initially it was the rather common phenomenon of "people wanting to post a meme they had seen before underneath a celebrities tweet", with the added detail of the meme being directly relevant to the tweet it was posted under. But, Tony kept telling these stories on Twitter about times where he got almost recognised. And the image would, without fail, be posted underneath these stories.
It's like a ritual, if Tony posts a tweet about a social interaction he had, someone will post the image, without fail. And the image has transformed in its own right. The noticeable hallmarks of JPEG compression from being saved repeatedly across thousands of computers is present, but additionally, people, Started Editing More Quotes Onto The Image??? It's, definitely something!
I never intended for the image to be one of malice or mockery, making fun of Tony Hawk's perceived lack of legacy, but I always was worried that Tony considered the image to be meanspirited in nature. (A group of my friends attempted to detangle this misunderstanding on my birthday last year.) But in the time since I made THEN, Tony Hawk has returned to the limelight. In 2020, 2 years after the Existential Nightmare began, a critically well received and commercially successful remaster of the original two THPS games is released. (And for their success, the team behind it get consolidated into the Call of Duty mines by Activision, Because Nothing Good Can Ever Happen in the Games Industry.) Tony is back!
It turns out, that the fool might ultimately be me, as this stupid image will truly test the legacy of myself and not The Birdman, as it's probably the most famous piece of "art" I've ever made. To paraphrase Woman on Plane, "Who's Existential Nightmare was this again?"
