Crowdfunded documentary about the 'Tony Hawk's Pro Skater' series gets brilliant first trailer

The year was 1999. 

British school discos would absolutely go off when the DJ dropped S Club 7, The Rock formed a tag team with Mankind, Star Wars fans were subjected to Jar Jar Binks for the first time, and a little video game series called Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater offered a generation of young people a very good reason not to go outside. 

18 years and some 12 games later (not including spin-offs), and a full-length documentary about the series’ incredible history is in development. 

Pretending I’m a Superman is being headed up by Ralph D’Amato, a former producer at Neversoft who worked on the first Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater titles. 

The film, which has an ambitious but flexible crowdfunding target of $75,000, aims to follow the series from the very beginning and go behind-the-scenes to find out how it became such a global phenomenon. 

In the brand new trailer, we see interviews with Rodney Mullen and the Birdman himself, and if the doc goes ahead D’Amato has a lot of the original Neversoft developers on board. 

The Tony Hawk games have endured a pretty spectacular fall from grace over the years. The first few entries were unanimously adored; Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 remains the second-highest rated game of all time on Metacritic, with a combined score of 98. The reaction to the most recent game, 2015’s Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5, could not have been more different. In development it had looked like a return to the series’ roots, but widespread glitches, broken physics and bland, uninspired level design made it something of a tragic flop. 

Thankfully, it sounds as if Pretending I’m a Superman will be more focused on Hawk in its heyday, when it was all about pop-punk, ridiculous combos and a blatant disregard for private property. Get this thing made.