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Lance Mountain
The Bones Brigade Video Show, Powell Peralta, 1984
Lance Mountain was not the team's top contest skater, and his appearance here proved that did not matter. His goofy, self-mocking presence made skating on tape feel like hanging out with friends, and that tone became the template for every video that sells a crew's personality as much as its tricks. Powell expected to sell around 300 copies on VHS and sold 30,000, which showed every board company that a video could build a team. Start here to see where skate video culture began.
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Ray Barbee
Born
Public Domain, Powell Peralta, 1988
In a video packed with vert heroes, Ray Barbee rolled through ordinary streets with a relaxed, flowing style and a bag of no complies that looked nothing like the rest of the Bones Brigade. He was one of the first skaters to bring freestyle and flatland tricks to the street, and his ollie combinations showed how much could happen on flat ground with no ramp in sight. For anyone who skates curbs and parking lots more than parks, this is an origin story worth knowing.
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Matt Hensley
Hokus Pokus, H-Street, 1989
H-Street's rough, homemade videos were the opposite of Powell's big productions, and Matt Hensley was their standout. Tre flips, backside flip melons, 50-50s on tall flat bars and even hand drags looked light years ahead of his peers, and skaters copied his hunched, back-knee-tucked stance as much as his tricks. The music and editing have aged, but the skating explains why so much early 1990s street skating looks the way it does. Watch it right after Ray Barbee for the other side of late 1980s street.
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Natas Kaupas
Born
Streets on Fire, Santa Cruz, 1989
The fire hydrant is the moment everyone remembers: Natas Kaupas ollies onto it and spins a full 720 on top, a move that became known as the Natas spin and later turned up in snowboarding and the Tony Hawk's games. The rest of the part matters just as much, because Kaupas treated walls, benches and street furniture as terrain at a time when most pros still lived on ramps. Watch it to see street skating being invented in real time.
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Mark Gonzales
Video Days, Blind Skateboards, 1991
If you watch only one part from the early street era, make it this one. Spike Jonze filmed Mark Gonzales skating parking lots, ditches, plazas and streets with a playful, unpredictable energy that still feels modern, and the part includes the first ollie of the Wallenberg set in San Francisco, a gap that still scares people. Video Days is often credited as the most important skate video ever made, and this part is the main reason.
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Rodney Mullen
Born
Questionable, Plan B, 1992
The godfather of flatground flip tricks steps off his freestyle board and into the street. Rodney Mullen opens with classic freestyle on flat ground, then carries that vocabulary across public terrain, debuting the kickflip underflip and the Casper slide along the way. It is the hinge between the freestyle era and modern technical street skating, and the darkslide he showed a year later in Virtual Reality grew from the same shift. Essential for anyone who loves tech.
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Pat Duffy
Born
Questionable, Plan B, 1992
A virtual unknown from Northern California made his video debut by taking on some of the burliest handrails anyone had seen filmed. Pat Duffy's part turned rail skating from a novelty into a proving ground, and almost every big-rail part since owes something to it. Where Mullen's section in the same video pushed tricks forward on flat ground, Duffy pushed the size of the obstacle, so watch them back to back to see two futures of street skating arrive at once.
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Mike Carroll (skateboarder)
Born
Questionable, Plan B, 1992
The third landmark from Questionable, and for many the purest record of what San Francisco's Embarcadero did to skating. Mike Carroll took the plaza's ledges and stairs and made tricks that had seemed impossible only recently look routine, with a quick, clean style that still holds up. Where Mullen brought the tricks and Duffy brought the rails, Carroll showed how one spot could shape a generation. Watch all three back to back.
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Henry Sanchez
Tim and Henry's Pack of Lies, Blind Skateboards, 1992
This is the Embarcadero era in its purest form. Henry Sanchez powers through San Francisco's most famous plaza, seemingly inventing tricks as he goes, with a mix of pop, speed and ledge control that defined what a plaza skater could be. Blind's first video gave him a full-length part, and he used every second of it. Watch it if you want to understand why a slab of San Francisco waterfront became the center of the skate world in the early 1990s.
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Tom Penny
Born
High Five, Etnies, 1995
A teenager who grew up skating in Oxford, England, made the American pros look stiff. Tom Penny was switch flipping over 10-stair rails and going even bigger regular, with a loose, catlike landing style that made enormous tricks look casual. The part dragged technical skating onto big obstacles and made smoothness part of the scorecard. Skaters still copy the way Penny rode, which is the best argument for watching where it started.
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Guy Mariano
Born
Mouse, Girl Skateboards, 1996
Five years after his kid part in Video Days, Guy Mariano returned with skating so far ahead of its time that he needed only the occasional clip to prove it. The switch and ledge tricks here look like they were filmed a decade later, and the part set the standard of precision that the Girl and Chocolate crews would chase through the late 1990s. Many longtime skaters rank it as the best part of the decade, and it rewards a slow, frame-by-frame rewatch.
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Jamie Thomas
Born
Welcome to Hell, Toy Machine, 1996
After this part, a trick's merit was suddenly measured by its stair count. Jamie Thomas threw himself down huge rails and sets with grim determination, and the way the section was edited laid out the shape of the modern video part. Love or hate the stair-counting era it kicked off, you cannot understand late 1990s skating without it. Watch it alongside Elissa Steamer's part from the same video.
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Elissa Steamer
Born
Welcome to Hell, Toy Machine, 1996
Elissa Steamer's section is widely cited as the first street part by a woman in a major skate video, and it earned its spot on merit rather than as a novelty. Jamie Thomas stayed with her in Fort Myers, Florida, to film it, and the result is raw, fast street skating that holds its own next to the men in the video. For anyone tracing how women's street skating got its foothold in company videos, this is the first stop.
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Ricky Oyola
Eastern Exposure 3: Underachievers, Dan Wolfe, 1996
Before this part, most skaters rode tiny boards and tiny wheels. Philadelphia's Ricky Oyola blasted through rough city spots fast, on bigger wheels, and suddenly everyone was hunting for pole jams. Shot in black and white on raggedy East Coast terrain, it made speed and grit look cooler than the slow, small-wheel tech of the West Coast. If you skate crusty city streets instead of smooth plazas, this is your lineage.
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Josh Kalis
Born
Timecode, Alien Workshop, 1997
Josh Kalis made ledge skating look like a science. The headline clip is a switch backside tailslide down San Francisco's now-gone Hubba Hideout, a ledge feat that is still no joke today, but the whole part is a lesson in clean, controlled ledge work with perfect pop in and out. It helped define the polished, East Coast-meets-plaza style that dominated the turn of the century, and it is the part to study if ledges are your thing.
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Tony Hawk
Born
The End, Birdhouse, 1998
Vert was supposed to be dying in the street-obsessed 1990s, and Tony Hawk answered with a full loop. The End documents the first time he rode all the way around the loop, an inverted track where a mistake means falling straight down, and the tension before he makes it is unlike anything else on this list. Watch it for the moment vert proved it still had new ground to cover, then compare it with the street parts around it.
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Andrew Reynolds (skateboarder)
Born
The End, Birdhouse, 1998
Tony Hawk's loop gets the headlines, but The End also made Andrew Reynolds. His part, which includes a section filmed at the Bro Bowl in Tampa, showed the power and pop that would define a career spent jumping huge stairs and gaps, and Reynolds won Thrasher's Skater of the Year the same year. Transworld later named him the tenth most influential skateboarder of all time. Watch it to meet the Boss before Baker.
More about Andrew Reynolds (skateboarder)18
Eric Koston
Born
Menikmati, éS, 2000
éS stacked this video with an international dream team, including Tom Penny, Arto Saari and Bob Burnquist, and still handed the last part to Eric Koston. He earned it with handrail tricks nobody had seen before and a closing backside noseblunt done perfectly. Menikmati is regarded as one of the most influential skate videos ever made, and Koston's ender is the reason most people rewind it. Watch it as the bridge from 1990s plaza tech to the big-rail 2000s.
More about Eric Koston19
PJ Ladd
PJ Ladd's Wonderful, Horrible Life, Coliseum Skate Shop, 2002
A Boston-area skate shop video made a young local skater famous almost overnight. PJ Ladd's part took technical skating to new heights, with ledge combinations so precise they looked rehearsed, and it was this section that catapulted him to the attention of the industry. It also proved that a shop video, filmed far from California, could set the agenda for the whole sport. Watch it to see how the 2000s tech style was born.
More about PJ Ladd20
Danny Way
Born
The DC Video, DC Shoes, 2003
This is where the MegaRamp got its name. Danny Way dreamed up the setup of a roll-in, a gap jump and a giant quarterpipe, built it in the California desert and unveiled it in this video, setting world records for the longest jump, 75 feet, and the highest air, 23.5 feet, in a single run. Nothing about vert skating looked the same afterward: the format went on to the X Games and a whole branch of big-air skating. Watch it for scale that still looks unreal.
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Guy Mariano
Born
Fully Flared, Lakai, 2007
One of the great comebacks in skate history. After years away from skating during a fight with addiction, Guy Mariano returned in Lakai's Fully Flared with a part that matched the hardest street skating of its day and then went past it. It won Best Video Part and Best Street at the Transworld Skateboarding Awards and reset expectations for how long a skater's prime could last. Watch it after his Mouse part to feel the full arc.
More about Guy Mariano22
Dylan Rieder
Born
Dylan., Gravis, 2010
After an Alien Workshop part in Mind Field that some felt undersold him, Dylan Rieder reunited with filmer Greg Hunt and made his magnum opus. High pop, effortless speed and an almost formal sense of style turned spots within a mile of his home into something cinematic, and the part was one of the first free online solo parts. It is the clearest case on this list of style itself, not a new trick, changing what skaters wanted to look like.
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Shane O'Neill (skateboarder)
Born
Stand-alone part, The Berrics, 2010
The skating is relentless, Australian-born tech at its most precise, but the reason this part belongs here is how it reached people. Shane O'Neill released it on The Berrics as an individual part for 99 cents, the first time a skater sold a single video part on its own rather than as one section of a full-length video. Today's stream of one-off online parts follows the path it opened, so watch it as the moment the full-length VHS era started to give way.
More about Shane O'Neill (skateboarder)24
Leo Baker (skateboarder)
Born
Bombshell, Thrasher Magazine, 2013
Leo Baker filmed this first full part while working a design job after college, and Thrasher put it out on its website. It made the case that women's street skating deserved full parts and real sponsorship rather than a token clip in a team video. Baker later rode for Nike SB, and this is where that run started. Watch it next to Elissa Steamer's Welcome to Hell part to see how far the gap had closed.
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