I thought he was playing a PlayStation game on a less known type of controller. Googled it, apparently was an early version of the game Wipeout, unsure if it was an arcade game. Kinda makes sense for the hackers to have an early version.
I'll say this about Hackers: it's a period piece about what we (at the time) wanted out of the present. We wanted hacking, computers, living at the bleeding edge of all this tech, to look and sound that cool. So the movie takes liberties.
As a concept, that absolutely could be done now. You just need someone to work with today's youth and extrapolate from the present.
I used to roller-blade all over the place in the town I grew up in. But most of the roads where I live are all dirt and gravel. So the amount of people who play on skateboards around here is pretty minimal too.