It's difficult to think of games whose soundtrack had a bigger impact on an entire generation than the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series. Popular music had been a part of games for decades: Journey Escape for the Atari 2600 was a particularly weird example, and the use of Song 2 by Blur in FIFA: Road to World Cup 98 was iconic. But the Tony Hawk series was the first to use punk music in this way, and for many kids from the suburbs and the country, it was the first time they interacted with punk.
The structure of bite-sized two-minute levels was perfect for putting the music at the heart of the game as much as the skating was. The punk—or maybe hip hop or thrash—charging over each run became inextricably linked to skating, even for kids who had never touched a board or been to a park.
