Why did Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 feature a booby trap banned by the UN?

a few years back i was talking to my roommate about how we would fortify our apartment in the event of a home alone scenario and i made some offhand joke about a punji pit and he said oh yeah like in tony hawk and i said and also the vietnam war and he replied the vietnam war my roommate thought a punji pit was just a silly term for a spike trap invented by tony hawk's pro skater 2. and though that is extremely funny i can't really fault him for that that conversation made me realize that there's probably an entire generation of people myself included who were introduced to a terrifying guerrilla warfare tactic from a skateboarding video game and ever since that conversation i have been haunted by one question why did they put a punji pit into tony hawk's pro skater 2. if you don't know what i'm referencing let's start with the game in tony hawk's pro skater 2 neversoft introduced the park editor which lets you create your own skatepark it wasn't especially robust but it had everything you'd need ramps rails pipes and a dirty hole full of sharpened sticks now a spike pit in a video game isn't strange they are an integral part of platformers and even tony hawk is no stranger to danger though pro skater 2 wasn't quite as ridiculous as say american wasteland there were still plenty of places to perish but the weird thing is that this isn't just some run-of-the-mill medieval dungeon grade spike pit it's specifically called a punji pit and what is a punji pit in the late 1800s the british indian army was off doing british empire [ __ ] in burma and the catching people did not like that so they devised sharpened stick traps for defense the british called them punji stix which most likely derives from the catching language but the thing that really made punji stix seep into the american consciousness was the vietnam war the vietnam war was a period that most historians have designated as an extremely shitty time but the important thing to note for this video is that when the vietcong and the americans were fighting there was a massive power imbalance so the vietcong relied on guerrilla warfare to help even that playing field in opposing an american force equipped with the most sophisticated armamentarium ever used in warfare the vietcong continued to supplement their modern weapons with implements similar to those devised by their ancestors this quote comes from a 1967 paper published in the annals of surgery it's a case study all about punji stick wounds and it highlights a lot of the ways pungy sticks were used including the pit the tony hawk idea of a pungy pit is one where you fall 20 feet while doing a pizza guy and instantly die but real pungie sticks were more effective at injuring soldiers and taking them out of the field in this case study over a third of the wounds due to hostile action were caused by punji sticks and they took a soldier out of combat for an average of three weeks what was essentially well-hidden sharpened bamboo had a massive toll on the american army these sharpened stick traps became a symbol for guerilla tactics and in 1983 the un's convention on certain conventional weapons went into effect banning things like booby traps and mines this included pungy sticks but as people started to grapple with the atrocities of the vietnam war punji stix started showing up in more vietnam war-related media in first blood the vietnam war vet rambo makes something akin to a malign gate to stop a police officer in the woods [Music] [Applause] it's brutal and grisly action films aren't the only place these violent and terrifying punji sticks appear they also show up in the fun and lighthearted skateboarding video game tony hawk's pro skater 2. the punji pit never bothered me as a kid and i've had a lot of trouble trying to put into words exactly why it's haunting me now originally i thought it was because it ruins my suspension of disbelief but these games already have ridiculous scenarios like elderly sex clown gene simmons being able to do a boardslide and platform boots it was only once i learned about the punji pit's historical roots that it became an issue which means it might be a scary version of something called fridge logic fridge logic is the modern term for an icebox scene an idea that supposedly originated with alfred hitchcock the story goes that when asked about a small plot hole in vertigo he responded that you don't notice the inconsistency until you've gone home and start pulling cold chicken out of the icebox fridge logic doesn't affect you while you're watching the movie but a few hours later after giving it some thought you go hey wait a second but the situation with the punji pit goes one step further into fridge horror this is the same delayed reaction but instead of going hey wait a second it becomes hey wait a second fridge horror is one of the pokemon fandom's favorite pastimes you never really thought much about the implications of ghost types as a six-year-old but now you are burdened with the knowledge of death so gengar just hits different tony hawk could have avoided fridge horror entirely by just not referencing a un-banned guerilla warfare tactic call it a spike pit neversoft and that makes me believe there must be a reason why developers did this and i will get to the bottom of this 20 year old mystery i reached out to a number of ex-neversoft employees with a request for a video interview about this very simple question and then i waited and to be perfectly honest i thought that might be how this video was going to end the game was published 20 years ago the majority of neversoft employees have moved on to different projects or left the game industry entirely neversoft doesn't even exist as a studio anymore it's ridiculous to ask them to remember why one tiny piece of a game they made two decades ago was named a certain way but then a glimmer of hope i received an email back from mick west once a designer and programmer he's now a professional writer and conspiracy theory debunker when i saw his name in my inbox i knew i had struck gold well it was unrefined gold but i had faith that he would be the person to know why they went with a punji pit so long as i gave him the time he required to go ba okay 59 minutes later he had gone through old emails and code and it turned up nothing but he also sent over some of the pungy script code from thps3 and the original punji pit sound effect you win some you lose some but what's this i received one more email from scott pease the studio development director at neversoft and it started in the most promising way imaginable brian uh-oh though his email states that he can neither confirm nor deny that watching first blood at an impressionable age might have influenced this decision in a subtle way the truth is he can't even remember if it was his idea or someone else's entirely scott's email hints at wanting to do something memorable and unique and naming your spike pit a punji pit certainly does that there's no way that my roommate or i would have remembered this weird piece of gaming ephemera if it wasn't called a punji pit so mission accomplished and in case you are as interested as i am you'll be happy to know that in the remake of pro skater 1 and 2 there is still a park editor and the punji pit doesn't exist there isn't a spike pit at all it appears that the 20 years between the original and the remake has changed game development enough that someone other than me asked hey why is there a punji pit here nowadays most aaa games need an explanation for every minor detail but back in the early days of pro skater you could just have a punji pit then no one would ask you about it until 20 years later when some [ __ ] clogs up your inbox with requests for an interview but that silly choice still had ramifications and it ended up haunting me two decades after the fact but like a friendly haunting like casper the truth is sometimes creators just do a thing because they can and it isn't much deeper than that anyway here's the sound of falling into the punji pit 30 times in a row that's a good sound design i'll tell you what i love it well let's keep it going let's just keep it going you know why not

Channel: Polygon

Views: 1,070,225

Rating: 4.9243584 out of 5

Keywords: tony hawk, brian david gilbert, thps, pro skater 2, pungee pit, punji, punji stick, vietnam war, first blood, rambo, tony hawks pro skater, pro skater, tony hawks pro skater 2, videogames, video games, polygon, spike pit, spike trap, spikes, fridge logic, fridge horror, vietnam, pro skater remake, skateboard, skateboarding, skate park, create a park, skater, n64, playstation, remake, reboot, icebox scene, ramp, pit, park editor, guerrilla, guerrilla warfare, booby trap, UN, united nations

Id: dnOk-197DGE

Length: 9min 26sec (566 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 06 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/J_eseele]

Lights out, guerrilla radio...

[u/SamSlate]

https://ogn.theonion.com/nostalgia-trip-tony-hawks-pro-skater-developers-conf-1844883885

[u/thedude1179]

This was pretty entertaining thanks, good host

[u/thewhiteafrican]

Can never have too much BDG

[u/Crowbarmagic]

Surprisingly good video considering the topic is so minor and niche. And it didn't at all feel like he was padding* out the video just to get close to that 9-10 minutes mark like many youtubers do. Every bit of the video was relevant and on-point. Well done!

*Except for the 30 punji pit sound effects at the end I guess, but it compliments the video ;)

[u/[deleted]]

tl:dw Nobody really remembers, but probably threw it in because it's fucking rad, maybe Rambo inspired.

[u/Milooski]

Top tier way to end a video

[u/TheCyanKnight]

Skaters like slang.

[u/matthewryanrobinson6]

I completely forgot that they even had it in there.