Activision's remaster of the first two Tony Hawk's Pro Skater games is approaching its September 4 release, and fans of the extreme sports titles were given a taste of what is to come through the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2 Remaster warehouse demo. For those who can't get enough of the classic skateboarding series, a documentary about its development called Pretending I'm a Superman: The Tony Hawk Video Game Story is now available through video on demand and streaming in North America, Australia, and New Zealand.
The project began when Director Ludvig Gur met Tony Hawk after graduating from high school in 2016, according to an AMA he hosted on Reddit today. Pretending I'm a Superman premiered at the Mammoth Film Festival this year, and includes "never-before-seen footage and interviews" with Hawk and other skaters like Steve Caballero and Rodney Mullen.
Gur said he began making YouTube videos in high school, and it's "surreal" to have made a feature-length documentary starring "a lot of the legends I've always looked up to." The team will be announcing release dates for Europe soon, and Gur encourages fans to follow the documentary's social media channels to find out when Pretending I'm a Superman comes to other territories.
Gur said he and Producer Ralph D'Amato, a former Neversoft employee, focus primarily on the first two Tony Hawk's Pro Skater games because "they had the most amount of impact on skateboarding, pop culture, etc." He wanted to cover the games that established a genre and "sent skateboarding into the mainstream," affording them popularity that can still be seen with the upcoming remasters having potentially new celebrity cameos.
Pretending I'm a Superman focuses heavily on the community aspects of the series that, "Changed lives and shaped a generation." That, in turn, builds off a strong community around skateboarding itself, evident by Tony Hawk changing the "mute grab" trick's name to honor its creator Chris Weedle.
The documentary can be found on iTunes, YouTube, Amazon Prime Video, and numerous other platforms according to its website, and Gur said there are extra features on iTunes that cover some history for games like Tony Hawk's Underground and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3. Between the revival of this popular series and new mainstream releases like Easy Day Studios' Skater XL, now seems like a great time to be a fan of extreme sports games.
Pretending I'm a Superman: The Tony Hawk Video Game Story is available now through VOD and streaming.
Sources: Pretending I'm a Superman, Reddit