Peak Platforming

On the grassroots possibilities for skater cyborgs of the future

Warning: this one’s for the nerds, the geeks, the dorks, skateboarders, college students, and basement dwelling hermits, for all of us who are obsessed with singing tricky stories to seep through the cracks of concrete worlds.

For the past few years I’ve been making the argument that skateboarding’s innate piracy is a more robust undercurrent of our history than the industrial invasions of Sports or Fine Arts. When I first began writing down some scholarly skate notes, I was looking forward to a thriving new generation of skaters (albeit worried about their hunger for the outdoors generally) and not too confident in gambling on anything regarding their specific fractal explorations of the skate frontier. Since then, a new international generation of skaters have already made themselves wonderfully visible, exciting me every day.

A particularly potent discovery in the post-covid era has been the uncloseting of geeky skateboarding. Thanks to the increasing structural presence of the internet and it’s archival possibilities within the skateboard superorganism, I have become intrigued by how truly nerdy we have always been, and also therefore just how insidious the mainstream Sportification has truly been in hiding our nerdy pirate backbone behind so much jockish clothes.

In the wake of these opposing forces, Great Skate History tends to wash away a lot of the more grass roots, more honest identity of skatefolk. Recognizing this mysterious reality of skate history and reflecting upon recent trends in devoted skatefolk compels me to suggest that skaters usually dismiss an interesting geeky demographic dimension of our population: we are huge video gamers, perhaps moreso than Sports spectators.

Of course skateboarding is often, to my personal dismay, a Sport. It is real material athleticism, and never actually a video game… (although a young middle-schooler Kyota Umeki proved 10 years ago you could actually film a fell length starring yours truly with a Nintendo DS)

The uncountable, fractal, generative language of skateboarding carnage cannot possibly be captured by simulated characters enclosed within finite little programs like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater (THPS) or EA Skate. It is just as wrong however, to say that the now-mainstream past time of video gaming, as a culture of real human consumers, is bound within any finite programming. Video game production, catering to the sensibilities of alienated industrial super fanatics, has also become an enchanted, mutated, pirate world.

For a clear view of the parallel journeys embarked upon by video gamers and skaters, we must recognize that THPS is not only a historical landmark in the development of skate culture, and one of the greatest video games of all time, but specifically and rarely-noted, it is one of the greatest platformers of all time. Upon historical reflection we can recognize how skateboarding and platformer video games have literally grown up side by side, and are rooted in similar ritual worship of the most fun ways to engage our architectural sensibilities. In dweeb terms, skateboarding is ‘peak’ platforming, with a tendency to possess its victims so far as making them question if it is the single best expression of the modern human condition. Throughout this essay I will discuss platforming communities as a whole, generally referring to the combined set of skateboarders, gamers, and parkour artists among many others unless otherwise specified. I believe all platformers have a few lessons to learn about our inner psyches, our communities, and perhaps even where we might be headed in the near future, by paying a bit of attention toward other platforming communities and their Sportifiers.

Jumpers

The canonical “first platformer” is Nintendo’s Donkey Kong, starring the villain Donkey Kong and hero ‘Janpuman’ (Jumpman) who needs to catch up to DK by climbing platforms, ladders, hopping over obstacles, and rescuing the captured princess in distress. Janpuman soon became beloved around the world with the household name Mario of the Super Mario Bros., an Italian-American immigrant duo of plumbers who engage in endless journeys through their twisted fate with the other-worldly Mushroom Kingdom and their royal personnel.

Today we know of Mario as a magically morphing superhero, but Jumpman began the series with his single power being his ability to hop from platform to platform, through tunnels, up ladders, and up and over monsters. The basic success of early video game designs (and clearly modern ones as well) lies in the ability for developers to easily implement a mechanical digital task that is aesthetically pleasing for the consumer. A simply designed character moving around linear striated spaces was both inherently simple to program and well-attuned to the senses of children growing up in industrial landscapes. Thus, the foundational hero figure within the spectacularly diverse mainstream genre of platform adventure is a humble manual laborer whose simple ability to cleverly navigate various levels of estranged flattened space unravels limitless adventure.

Every new version of Super Mario extends the linear spaces of Super Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong into new regions of the Mushroom Kingdom, Yoshi’s Islands, different galaxies, and lately the urban metropolis “New Donk City”. As Mario explores all these places with newer, more technical, fancier modes of jumping, the various physical worlds are endlessly aesthetically imaginative while nonetheless preserving an underlying structure of linear platforms upon which the player, as Mario, performs newer permutations of simply jumping from level to level. A huge majority of the greatest games of all time follow suit with this design aspect, from Crash Bandicoot to THPS. In this sense despite the environment of THPS sometimes receiving criticism for fetishizing the playground potential of tourism within urban life compared to the struggles of everyday reality, when compared to the absurdly flattened environments of the other most popular platformer franchises (the Mushroom Kingdom, alpine mountains, distant planets, jungles, ancient ruins, Dracula’s Castle) I think it is fair to say that THPS is simply the most iconic platformer video game with the least abstracted, least overly-fantastically delineated, and most realistic habitat.

Striated Spirit Quests

Platformers tap into an acute sensibility of the gamer that is cultivated not only by their consumption of video games, or digital products, or commodities, but ultimately is bolstered on a daily basis through life in the industrial landscape, as a human being obsessed with smooth lines, monoliths, and living in striated space.

In hindsight, with the help of newer more progressive styles of skateboard video games, the hyper-linear game mechanics of the THPS series clearly fail to capture the nuanced, smooth, but lop-sided mechanics of actual skating. Nonetheless, THPS is the most iconic skateboard video game franchise of all time, and not only for having great marketing at a ripe time for corporate skateboarding, but for capturing how overcoming the necessary platforms to become a skateboarder offers a spirit quest, a narrative approach which the best future skateboard games (all of which only touch upon the spiritual journey of skateboarding itself) would carry naturally along with the entire platformer genre.

Despite maintaining a fundamental skeletal structure of linear platform levels and characters who move by simply jumping, platformers remain at the top of the charts of both mainstream and cult classic games throughout the ages of video game mass production, even in the minimalist old school style of 8bit independent video games. A primary reason, I propose, is that these simple digital outlets for the expression of striated sensibility have established a new international medium for folk art of industrial people, or perhaps even ‘lifestyle religion’ in the terms of skate sociologist Paul O’Connor (the alchemist). After decades of intense cultural engagement, the realms of platformer video games have become truly culturally enchanted. These enchantments can be seen in the historical dynamics of both the in-game aesthetics and mechanics of popular platformer franchises as well as the social structure and popular tastes of their fan bases.

More or less, platformers as a collective have become a massively dispersed vehicle for gamers to celebrate the endless joy of developing an eye for smooth movement pathways using complexities and tricks that arise from minor variants in platform movement possibilities: different jump heights, run speeds, dash options, landing options, multi-jump syncopation, perfect pivots, wavedashes, front shuv back nosegrind reverts, etc. The best platformer games convince the player that the possible combinations of a deep mastery of the most fundamental movement options provide practically endless options for a new and exciting dance: that the games’ unique definitive movement language effectively serves as a generative grammar from which uncountably infinite situational expressions are available. The more one plays, and the more they enchant their spaces with direct evidence supporting the seeming endlessness of movement possibility, the deeper one finds themselves personally identifying as a journeyer of this particular craft, a skater, a gamer, engaged on an indefinite quest to explore their dynamic preferences, perhaps even maximizing some sort of inner potential, and always finding deeper more clever ways to make in-game progress beyond simply holding forward.

As video game developers have learned to cater to the growing attachments of fans, the lore/narrative of platformers have become attuned to the spirit quest as well. The ‘Metroidvania’ genre holds its throne as a mainstream staple today because of the endless lore cravings of the fandoms of the Metroid and Castlevania franchises. Both the original Metroid and Castlevania are nearly devoid of anything resembling an interesting plot or visual variety throughout the journey. This changed immediately upon all of their seemingly endless sequels. Today we find lifelong fans of each series obsessing over the lore of both new and old versions of franchises which have become rich sources of narrative mystery. Metroidvanias are defined by the player discovering their unknown but open physical world through platforming and dungeon-crawling, inevitably revealing unexpected secrets about their own mysterious playable character through the highly-punishing tribulations of their dark journey. Seemingly perfecting the genre, indie developer Team Cherry has proven with their Hollow Knight franchise that this archetype of adventure game can remain among the most popular, sophisticated, and highly acclaimed modern media without leaving the realm of a visually and mechanically intuitive 2D cartoon hopping around paved levels of space.

Beyond Metroidvanias, it seems that most successful modern platformer video games directly incorporate the definitive mechanical sensations of the genre into the narrative lore itself. One shallow way this is achieved is through the implementation of ‘Easter eggs’, which are common forms of homage to past classics which can be found all over indie game development (such as Madeline’s needed ability to ‘hyperdash’ in Celeste, expanding upon the ‘wavedash’ from Smash Bros.), and is even more popular as a form of self-referential advertisement within Nintendo games (such as 3D Mario’s occasional need to solve puzzles on building walls by entering warp pipes back to 2D Mario Land). On a deeper level, Celeste is so popular among fans because of its original heartfelt narrative arc of the heroine Madeline, a lonely post-modern working class escapist in search of meaningful mountains to climb, confronting inner levels of self-doubt through trial and tribulation.

Building the church: from grassroots to the Heavens

Platformers were still finding their legs in the ‘80s before the Golden Ages of the ‘90s and early 2000s. Lifelong platformer fans, who have now mostly grown up from the Golden Age onward, have become an elusively robust scene loosely duct-taped together by the common grounds of the internet. Mainstream presentations of any platformer production (video game trailers, blockbuster movies, magazine covers, live stunts) may not directly reveal the community contributions necessary to achieve the heavy cultural positions of fictional characters like Super Mario or Thrasher Magazine, and thus it cannot be understated how these products could not exist without decades of historical enchantment rooted in the player communities.

All platformer histories are inescapably cursed with pirate dialectics: a tug-of-war between hegemonic industrial designs from above and tricky inventive mutant path-making from below. As is obvious in the case of video games (crucially and importantly Nintendo ones), the Creator owns the world as both physical and intellectual property. What is just as obvious in the case of skateboarding, but also by observing the communities of speedrunning, streaming, competitive gaming, fan art, indie developers, and countless other contributors to the human lifeblood of the global platformer phenomenon is that the real people who historically enchant and perform magic in the platformer realm fundamentally play the most basic role in the historical and narrative development of the franchise. The various types of tricksters playing the game influence the kinds of stories they frequently retell, or are able to retell depending on the relationships between the scene and the Creator and how the Creator feels about their own dominance of property. Regardless, the lasting iconic images of any platforming scene, like a Thrasher cover, an Olympic medal, a Hollywood animated movie, theme park, consumer product award, or viral video clip, is always a chimera of influences from the platform’s Creator and community throughout history.

I conclude with a skateboarder’s reflection on my most beloved platformer game (aside from the true peak actual physical platformer that is street skateboarding), the cult classic Super Smash Bros. franchise, argued by many including myself to be the best fighting game franchise of all time not only for holding a legal chokehold on all your favorite lovable video game characters smashed into one game, but because it is the foundational and still the most fun platform fighter game. Most fighting games are stiff and linear one-dimensional stand-offs. Smash opens up a whole new world of gaming by massively expanding the player’s available movement options with platforms, stage transformations, a new mode of sumo-style fighting where landing back on your own two feet after losing control is equivalent to staying alive, and generally making every movement option faster than any fighting game ever before by the release of the most beloved second edition of the game (Melee) for the Gamecube in 2001.

I promise I am still focused on skateboarding. As mentioned earlier, I am only writing this with the conviction that there are more people mildly caught in the cross-hairs of Melee and skateboarding than we might believe. For a not so mild example of significant skaters involved with Melee, I must strongly disagree with artist and writer Kevin Spanky Long’s take on internet sensation Gifted Hater that his popularity can be attributed to the fact that, “there’s no one else, really... that’s making articulate criticism of something that’s so subjective,” while of course agreeing that, “to believe you can do that and present it in, like, a really internet literate way… he’s doing something that people are obviously responding to.” While I’m a big fan of Gifted Hater, I recognize his success not as a result of any sort of analytical cleverness or unique “skatesmarts” at all, but rather his comfortability with a medium that only a seasoned gamer, indeed a fellow Melee player like myself would recognize. As talk shows of different kinds prove to be a dominant form of daily consumption despite technological advancements, from my perspective Gifted Hater is simply the most skate-steeped Melee streamer. As a Melee player, Gifted Hater is perfectly comfortable with internet hermitage, canceling immature weirdos who shouldn’t have ever really been anyone’s hero, the robustness of a grassroots community in the face of economic fluctuation, and generally rejecting his platform’s Creator. Skateboard media is swamped with podcasts full of bros who used to skate, amateur reflections of analytical sports content from ex-platformers who wannabe Charles Barkley. There are far fewer skaters who unabashedly, while coherently being tapped into core skate culture as much as the average skaterat, engage in the more popular and accessible talk show format of newer generations: the at-home streamer.

But more notably, and hopefully insightful, the Melee community illustrates incredible community strength in maintaining a multi-decade history of loyalty to their game (the second version in a franchise of five) in the face of multiple less-fun sequels, and even direct opposition from Nintendo themselves. The ‘Disney of Japan’ strategy of Nintendo has been to maintain total media control of their intellectual content, and deny any local college clubs or conventions of fan communities to stream any modified version of their game, nor conduct any major money-making Smash event, especially those which highlight the older less-profitable version of the franchise.

Despite all of this, despite experiencing highly volatile economic conditions, despite the constant disappointing creation and destruction of careers and beloved ritual events, despite failures at uniting peacefully with the communities of other Smash games or other close neighbor fighting games (primarily thanks to the antagonisms from Nintendo), the Melee community persists as the most robust competitive community of any video game. Undoubtedly addicted to their twenty year old game, we can still ideally give credit to gamers who stick to their game because they believe it is ‘peak’, that it is the most fun platformer of all time and has never had a close competitor. Perhaps due to 20 years of Nintendo’s efforts to prevent passionate fans from running their own tournaments, the community has fostered one of the biggest and most iconic performance video game communities of all time, with rules and controller markets and social networks and sponsorships grown entirely without central planning: grassroots from the ground up.

Nintendo has never promoted this scene with any positive light. But they have not been able to profit off of the franchise, not even newer versions, without recognizing and incorporating the history and popularity of the Melee community to various extents. If one is to watch the competitive community of the new fifth version of the game (Ultimate), they will find players who use newly printed Gamecube controllers plugged into a Nintendo Switch for no reason other than to pay homage to Melee, even though the player has likely never even really played Melee at all, yet likely enjoys Melee as a spectator sport. The unique beloved gamecube controller has become a wisdom tooth within the Smash franchise organism so popular that Nintendo actually does sell new Gamecube controllers specifically for the sake of Smash Bros players even though they refuse to re-release Melee or Gamecube consoles themselves. Similarly the newer game mechanics of recent editions are far simplified and crippled compared to Melee’s high-speed wild slipperiness, but they are full of cheap flashy animations that falsely and awkwardly invoke some of Melee’s hype to inexperienced observers.

We can also bear witness to the undeniable wrecking power of the Creator in their destruction of the Project M scene. Project M was a modded version of Brawl (the third, most hated edition of Smash), which Nintendo had originally programmed to stupify the movement options of Melee down to a point in which the core community would be unable to develop any fancy tricks and therefore lose any substantial influence over any sort of competitive scene. One beautiful counter-cultural result was the aforementioned ‘Revival of Melee’, in which players had to look at their favorite franchise in the mirror, ask themselves why they love it so much, and choose to play Melee in honor of their values. Another, perhaps even more notable, result was the development of Project M, which took the added characters and stages from Brawl but adjusted the physics of the game to play and feel like a truer sequel to Melee, becoming one of the most famous and beloved pirate mods of all video game history. Despite being a fan favorite, and still maintaining a small dedicated competitive community to this day, Nintendo’s incessant opposition has prevented any major Project M promotion anywhere on Earth. Events can fly under the radar, but they cannot be streamed or sponsored. For that reason, relative to any video game with actual support from their legal overlords, the Project M community is a limping corpse.

Nintendo loves control. They do not like a grassroots community wielding any visible influence over the image of any portion of the Mushroom Kingdom, let alone nearly all of their most iconic characters in one platform. They could easily profit off the thriving Melee community, even help it grow while exploiting the majority of the profits, but they refuse the option. They demand the illusion of absolute monopolistic control.

Skateboard hegemonies also love control. “Ride the Best, Fuck the Rest”, or “the only magazine that counts”, they say. Perhaps it’s simply due to the fact that being a heady nerd is super uncool that casual skate chats rarely discuss how Thrasher Magazine has become a perfect example of what some scholars would call a ‘technofeudalist’: a corporate monopoly over a sacred abstract internet ‘platform’ upon which the entire mass of a population ‘lives’ and ‘pays rent’. For me that is simply to say they are a monopoly capitalist. With their distribution of “the only award that counts” given to the most sponsored skater who makes the most iconic mecca to California and San Francisco and does the best trick down Wallenberg (a spot which they literally own in the sense of having the only deed to the roll-in and permission to legally skate the spot), Thrasher has become the literal lord of the primary hub of mainstream skate content, exploiting the most eager skate soldiers on a regular basis to skate the way that ‘does most for the mag’. With this rampant hegemony raging unchecked, the deeper more insidious waves of American corruption have leaked into the cracks of Thrasher’s Californian delusions over the course of 2025. The toxic webs of white Californian Christian finance bro culture within the deadweight ‘veterans’ of skateboarding, with their deep ripples across the San Francisco real estate tycoon that is Thrasher Magazine, is a ripe topic for some other future skate studies.

More importantly for this conclusion, the unstable oligopolistic condition of the skate industry is a primary driver of skateboarding’s endless fear of death, a narrative primarily driven by fragile industrial tycoons who fearfully cannot even believe in the longevity of their own hegemony as skateboarding’s choppy currents have historically proven their inevitable uncontrollability. The skateboard economy, built upon a platformer culture bound between Creators and practitioners, plunges unpredictably up and down, creating and destroying careers and rituals and friendships and even livelihoods with no remorse. Yet those deeply engaged on the quest will float through the tides. I’ll bet we always ultimately keep the ship afloat from a collective uncelebrated effort, from those who can’t stop supporting their most fun platformer despite the costs, from the bottom up, one level at a time, and not without some great tricks along the way. I’ll see you irl, futuristic gamer skaters.

GG’s,

Isaac