Elissa Steamer to Nora Vasconcellos: How Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater Make Women’s Road to Ski
Elissa Steamer can remember what ice ski video games are 1999.
She did not play many of them, and as a child she was more likely to shoot Mike Tyson punch or Zelda legend When she was skipping school. But there was 720Released in the corridors and on the original Nintendo. Likewise, there was Town & Country Designs Surfing Designs: Anger of wood and waterAnother NES game that collected surfing and skiing. Ski or die! It was another with 8 -bit drawings.
But as Steafer recalls, “None of them really felt like a ski board … it was in the eighties.”
At one time in the late 1990s, Steamer heard that some companies were making a video game attached to Tony Hawk. At that time, Steamer was then one of the emerging professional ski panels and has deals with companies such as Toy Machine and Baker, and it appeared in some direct ski tapes to VHS, which was common at the time-the most prominent in 1996 Welcome to hell Where people can see The 22 -year -old steame Sunday days He plays on loved footage.
One day, she found herself hanging in the garage of his colleague’s colleague, skipper Jimmy Thomas, who had a model of a 1999 copy Tony Hawk skirt. Steamer suffocated with the game slightly on PlayStation Thomas, and it was detonated from its appearance and appearance. Thomas told her, “I think they will contact you too.”
After a few days, Steamer was on the phone with the game makers, Activision and Neversoft, which put it on the idea of being in the game. After I already played a copy of it, Steamer did not hesitate to register. Thus, she became the first woman to be shown in the Tony Hawk video game.
Now, after 26 years, the effect of that first game remains. Countless people from inside and outside skiing have insulted this by pushing sport to the awareness of pop culture and making it accessible to a broader audience. Books were written on this topic, documentaries were produced, and studied articles were drafted about their resonance in places such as the New York Times And npr. Game Informer has named one of the 100 greatest video games ever. When children and adults alike played on writing on the walls, horses, and a deceptive attack, they were exposed to Narley’s graphic music and the culture surrounding skiing. Many of them fell in love with her.
“I mean, at the time, ski skiing was a very low key, and I think this type of strengthening in the main current,” said Steamer recently SB Nation. “You couldn’t have been able to ride the skateboard to see the skiboard. You can participate in a ski -skiing game in a wonderful way. You got eyes on skiing on skiing and our names and who we were.
“I think a lot of ski boom in the early first decade of the twentieth century was somewhat because of this video game.”
Since the native Thps success in 1999, the game has produced an additional 20 difference and sequence. Steamer appeared in many of them, with the latest exception.
Skater Tony Hawk’s Pro 3 + 4 – The full versions of A to Z from sequences were originally released in 2001 and 2002 – on July 11. The new version that fans in these classics love with modern promotions, new tricks, additions to soundtrack, unique parks and online play.
There are more skiers as well. It has long been gave the days when a steamer was the only woman who is playing in the game. Skater Tony Hawk’s Pro 3 + 4 It includes eight women skis and also Leo Baker, who is known as transgender and use their consciences.
Steamer, who recently celebrated her fifty birthday, feels like it includes the increasing game for women, minorities, and LGBTQ+ individuals a big role in exposing skiing to more people.
“We have learned that if you see someone like you do something you want to do, you know that you can do it,” says Baker. “So, yes, it was completely useful for women, transgender people, and strange people. The game is really comprehensive, as the world must be. The best thing to ski is that there are no rules. Just chaos.”
Noura Vascunus was 7 years old when she struck the first Video shelves of video game stores. She grew up in New England, as you called “Bog Land” where there were many barns, but not many paved corridors. Simply put, she was not surrounded by ski culture. However, Vasconcellos has not been able to get rid of her interest in skiing and consuming them through books and magazines that she will get in the library.
Then she arrived in THPS and soon found herself playing as much as she can in her cousin’s house or on the young TV in her brother’s room.
“I just feel that everything from music to learn literally from Elisa Baker was, it was through a video game,” Vasconuselus, 33, told SB NATATION. “It was one of the ways she got to explore skiing.”
One level in Thps 3 It is called “Al -Mathali Island”. It is also in the latest release, and it is based on the real Skatepark in Rudd Island that was destroyed in 2004. Vasconcellos was unable to ski despite living relatively soon, but he got his experience during the game.
“It is very funny, what is affected by your mind,” says Vasconcellos. “I just remember that people tell me how sick, and after that, I liked a kind of restoration, through the video game.”
After playing as a Bukhari in some old video games, Vasconcellos flourished in a professional skiers. She won a gold medal in the 2017 world championship and signed with Adidas. One of its ski plates is present in Smithsonian, but it seems that being in the Tony Hook video game comes with a social currency more than that or other prominent landmarks that hit her in her career.
“There are a lot of people from all angles of my life who cannot understand what it means to have a cover of a bull, or may not be able to understand a professional shoe … but they understand, like,” you are a playable character on Tony Hawk skiing, “because this is the interaction between people only with skiing on skiing. So, it is very cold.”
Vasconcellos and Steamer are two eighties in the same way Skater Tony Hawk’s Pro 3 + 4. Others are Lizi Armano, Leticia Bouvoni, Chloe Koville, Margillin Diel, Rissa Layal and Uri Nishimura.
For Vasconcellos, it seems that if it is not on Steamer in 1999, it may not appear for the first time in 2025.
“There were not many women who were preventing skiing professions. I think seeing how it was detonated … if you are a woman, you don’t get the biggest deals, you were getting scraps. So, it’s great to see this complete side of the circle now,” says Vasconcellos. “I was granted, we no longer buy houses from Tony Hawk, but they did so, and that was a way for these skiers to create wealth and to be themselves. For a girl like me at that time to play and photograph myself in that space, it is great.”
It can be said that skiing is the dominant as it was ever and Tony Hawk video games are a big reason. In 2028 in Los Angeles, skiing will appear in the Olympic Games for the third time.
Once again when she was accumulating gold medals in X games in mid-2000, Steamer thought the first woman to walk skiing and the first woman to be recruited ever in the ski celebrity Hall-there was an opportunity to connect sports to summer games one day. Now that they have, they are sitting, watching and checking all the wonderful young skiers who will come on a way to help him.
“I think the future of skiing is in safe hands,” says Baker. “I just bothered that the game has returned and I am happy to participate. It is really great to ski, and I think Tony Hook is incredible.”