Like anyone else, I have a handful of games that I know better than any others. These are the games whose layouts and core mechanics are moreso imprinted upon me than recalled when I go back to them, whose details are stored in the figurative spinal fluid rather than in the figurative back of the brain, the ones I crawl back to in times of uncertainty and play through in sessions closer to therapy and self-actualization than fun. Each echo sentiments from different ages, be they from the first encounter or from repeat plays – Every subsequent trip to Whomp’s Fortress re-sparks the feelings of Christmas Day 2000, each excursion into the Marble Gallery of Dracula’s Castle has me back in the staff cabins at Camp Naish exploring Symphony of the Night with my friends as a teenager, every jump on the Port Carverton spillway evoking the joy of a new game unwrapped on the first weekend of summer vacation after sophomore year. 

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 is the standout among standouts here. There is no game I know like that one. There are few, maybe no, works of any medium that I know so well, to which I’ve returned so often over such a span of time – April 26th, 2002, over 21 years ago, was when I first became acquainted with it, and it’s had a presence in some form ever since, be it the original Gamecube copy or those on other platforms that I’ve picked up from bargain bins and thrift stores along the way. I suspect I’ve put weeks into it in total, grinded the high-wires up to the funnel atop the Cruise Ship to collect the final secret tape thousands of times, and I still tend to watch the credit video to its end. I know it like I knew my childhood home and my 2003 Buick Le Sabre, but unlike both of them, I can still return to THPS3.

Those memories are, however, limited to that original version (for the sake of this piece, we’ll call it, the one released for PC, PlayStation 2, XBOX, and Gamecube, the Prime version). I have built up next-to-no experience with Shaba Games’ prior-generation port in these past 21 years. My friend Billy, who lived on the opposite side of the parking lot of the public pool from me growing up, had that version well before I had mine, so I had my first glimpses of the game’s levels while waiting to take turns on the controller at his house in early 2002. I think I rented the N64 version out of curiosity at a Blockbuster at some point, too. I think of it primarily as the source of an alternative version of Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades” chopped-down to fit within the space of a N64 cartridge, one that’s become known as “And Don’t Forget The Joker” for the priority it places on repeating that otherwise fairly insignificant part of the original song. Otherwise, before last week, I had surprisingly limited direct experience with it considering not only that, first, it’s a step-down port of one of my favorite games, second, I’m interested in that era of weird step-down ports from PS2 to PS1, and third, I’d spent significant time with both the Game Boy Color and Advance ports of the game during my youth, so it’s not as if I couldn’t have ever touched a non-Prime port.

Yet, there I was, spurred on at random on a free Sunday evening to try out the PS1 port.

There was a genuinely strange quality to experiencing lower-resolution, slightly altered versions of levels I’d been through hundreds of times before. Certain rails and ramps are where I expect them to be, others aren’t. Skyboxes are different, the scenery changes slightly, and technical limitations strip each level of its pedestrians, moving cars, and most adaptable environmental pieces. It’s a weird, weird experience, one most similar to one I have every few months in which I find myself wandering again through the halls of the one place I seem to consistently find myself in my dreams: The long-demolished Great Mall of the Great Plains in Olathe, Kansas, where I shopped and played as a child and worked as a college student on summer break. I routinely have dreams that I’m back there, walking the patterned carpets and past the fake planters and miniature playgrounds of its corridors, dealing with something or someone, sometimes amazed that it’s back open or that it never closed at all, sometimes paying no attention to its continued existence, sometimes as a shopper, sometimes as a maintenance worker, sometimes as a store employee. I always tend to notice, late on into the dream, that something’s off. There’s an escalator to a second floor that wasn’t there before. The hallway they started but never finished is completed. It’s an open-air mall all of a sudden. When I recognize those incongruities, I start to recognize I’m dreaming, and once I realize it in full, I awaken.

This port is similar. I’ll recognize everything, I’ll know exactly where I am, and yet… Something’s off. I have ranked each level from least to most similar to a waking dream, and I will lay out my reasoning for each in the following section of the post:

8. Canada

Canada is the closest thing to an entirely different level in this port. About half of the map is what I remember: The skatepark and the parking lot, which, outside of the flag hung on a piece of farm equipment and the snow on the ramps, could stand for many cities elsewhere in North America, not just Canada. The rest, though, is completely replaced. The bit to the side of the parking lot that expands into an inaccessible snowy prairie has been replaced by what looks like an old west town square, and the bit behind the spawn-point has been completely reconfigured as well, shrunken and vertically diminished. This version really highlights the opportunity presented by naming a single level of a skateboarding video game after an entire country of 39 million people. If the Prime version’s Canada reminded me of a small British Columbia logging town with a lot of heart and mischief, the port’s is an old outpost in Alberta that’s seen better days. 

7. The Foundry

The Foundry is the closest 1-to-1 analog to its Prime version of any of these. It is what I know. It is where I know I’ve been. The colors have faded and the workers are gone, but this is the place I know. It’s a bit like you’ve broken in while all of the workers are on a break, maybe on strike, but it’s the same Foundry.

6. Skater Island

The interior of Skater Island is the same as the one I know from the Prime version, but the hue’s slightly off. Where the ramps were a darker khaki color in the Prime version, they’re a sort of vanilla pudding yellow here. Skater Island has had the least potential for changed in terms of its population – In the Prime version, there are no people or cars to do without and no flashy signage or moving parts to miss – but there is an abnormal area, a little outdoor park, which is not so much a secret, as its location is made pretty obvious to the player – though an experienced player of the Prime version might not know to look for the opening that leads to it. This is sort of dreamlike, in that I expect the whimsy of the pirate ship, but as so often happens in my nocturnal excursions, I follow the white light only to find the mundane horror of a generic fun-box and quarter-pipes.

5. Rio De Janeiro

In terms of the layout of the main area, Rio might be the most accurately maintained map between versions. The park between the streets in the map’s center is nearly identical. That identicality makes the incongruence of the addition – An extra ramp and corridor up behind where the judges table would be in the Prime version that leads to a secret back-alley which yields relatively little of substance outside of a stat point and a new deck in the career mode – all the stranger.

The first time I found my way up the ramp and into the alleyway, I felt like Karen Navidson, shaking and confused by the spontaneous creation of an inexplicable hallway linking her bedroom to her children’s, losing the sanctity of what she once thought was fact about her new house. 

4. Tokyo

Prime Tokyo is defined by the bright neon lighting and signage enclosing the park at its center. Prime Tokyo evokes a feeling of grandeur in the player which justifies its prominence as the game’s final stage. This cannot be replicated fully on the weaker hardware, and the effect is significantly diminished. The luminescent glass facades and neon-pink rails are replaced basically by ramp coping that cycles through a spectrum of colors.

This is a bit of a disappointment and would, under more objective circumstances, leave Tokyo down near Canada, however it does remind me specifically of the late-summer of 2014 when I was moved from my job at a store in the Great Mall of the Great Plains to another location of the same chain in the Oak Park Mall located a few miles East. We were originally a kiosk, but since we sold sports apparel similar to the ones sold by the Champs Sports in front of which our kiosk sat and the Champs Sports complained to the mall management, we were moved to a vacant storefront on the second floor. It had been a Lacoste store, a brand that could no longer sufficiently carry its own weight like that by the mid-2010s. It had matte white walls with a soft ceiling lighting system. The lights were controlled by a panel in the back room, which had four settings, I don’t remember the first three, but my manager told me to set it on Setting D, which made the ceiling lights cycle between colors – red to purple to blue to green to yellow to orange to red – at a fifteen second interval. We had no sound system to play music, so I only heard echoes of the eight or so tracks played by the Disney store beneath us, the one I remember was a cover of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” by one of the pop/sitcom stars of that era. We were not allowed books or anything of the sort, always time to clean or straighten, though I got away with reading off the Kindle app and playing Threes and Desert Golfing on my phone while waiting for customers to enter, gawk, and complain about the prices of goods before inevitably not purchasing anything and leaving. I would sit and wait and count the changing colors, each cycle another minute and a half of a six and a half hour shift taking a chunk of another listless day among the featureless weeks of the Summer of 2014, the summer after Freshman year, the last of my teens, the one that should have meant more than it did but is now relegated to an anecdote featured in a blog post spawned by a design decision prompted by technical limitations made by a development team in San Francisco in 2001 to scrape the glory of a port of a next-generation hit on down to those who could not afford to experience it as intended.

3. Los Angeles

Los Angeles, in reality as it is in its Prime representation, is defined by cars and pedestrians. The cops chase an armored van, two guys by the Pershing Square balls argue about all manner of topics in perpetuity, commuters hustle and bustle on the overpass above the map until one causes the earthquake. Neither cars nor pedestrians populate PS1 Los Angeles.. There’s a post-apocalyptic feeling about PS1 Los Angeles – Worse than the normal one I get when I’m there, am I right, fellas? GO PADRES! – and it reminds me of the worst types of night terrors one can get, when the monster’s not after you, the mob of people isn’t going to attack you, the big truck’s not going to run you over, nothing’s going to happen to you, nothing’s going to happen ever again: The monster, the mob of people, the big truck, they existed long ago and never will again.

Much like these sorts of terrible nightmares, there is a suspiciously functional elevator for some reason as well.

2. Suburbia

Prime Suburbia is defined by its people as well. We know them, don’t we? The thin man in the creepy house, the guy who watches porno on his satellite dish, the farting construction worker, we know them. They are absent in the PS1 version. Suburbia is a collection of houses that either house no one or house everyone, some horrible terror forces them inside or some horrible terror has forced them all away from the area entirely: construction site abandoned, funboxes in the middle of the cul-de-sac untouched, trailer park bereft of nary a single boy. There are two active vehicles in Prime Suburbia. A biplane circles the exterior of the map intermittently and an ice cream truck circles within the cul-de-sac indefinitely. In the port, the biplane is absent and the ice cream truck is immobile, but it does contain the only person implied to exist external to the skater in PS1 THPS3: The Ice Cream Man, subject of one of the course goals: Ice the Ice Cream Man. For this goal, the skater must air over and thus destroy a wire holding up a crane, toppling it and sending it down atop the Ice Cream Truck, and bringing an untimely premature demise to the Ice Cream Man himself, one whom we never meet, never hear from, never even see drive the truck, but nonetheless kill. I believe that Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 is the only game bearing Tony Hawk’s name in which you kill, though it’s only implied that the man hanging off of the overpass in Prime Los Angeles dies, and here it’s quite explicit that you have ended a man’s life in PS1 Suburbia. 

1. The Airport

I am not the first on this damnable internet to say this: There is something uncanny about an empty airport at night. There is something uncanny about this empty airport, especially as a facsimile of an airport so defined by a palpable hustle and bustle of tickets moved and trams driving and pockets picked. The decision to make it night time, which helped to quiet the question of why there were no people but also raised the question of why our skater’s there if nobody else is, puts this on the plane of accessible but illogical reality we visit behind shut eyes. 

The release date of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 — October 30th, 2001, exactly 49 days after the psychic experience of being within an airport changed irreparably — adds another layer of eerie sheen to the sensations of skating around this vacant night-time hub. Lost luggage dots the floor, left to be snagged for the completion of a career mode goal. Flags still hang from the the terminal rails, put up by an anonymous worker at an indeterminable date to be torn down with little forethought by the player. The departure boards are legible, though never intended to be read: blocky orange teletext blinking details of trips from nowhere on vacant vessels for invented airlines.