In the spring of 2006, Rockstar Games surprised the world with the release of what remains to this day one of the studio’s most unusual and unexpected games, Table Tennis. This is a true love letter to the sport, with a depth and complexity that would impress even Jan-Olf Waldner. That’s certainly not what you’d expect from a developer who’s pretty much only given the world one violent action game after another before. So what exactly is the reasoning behind this strange project?
In a recent interview with IGN, Rockstar founder Sam Houser talked about how the studio wanted to do something completely different, showcasing the possibilities of a new generation of consoles, saying:
“We really liked Table Tennis and wanted to try and make something that would show audiences what was possible in the next generation of video games.
However, that doesn’t seem to be the whole truth, with Rockstar co-founder Jamie King mentioning that the game was primarily meant to demonstrate the power of their then-new RAGE engine, which would later power Grand Theft Auto IV, Grand Theft Auto V, the basis for Red Dead Redemption and Red Dead Redemption 2. King also said that RAGE was created primarily in response to Electronic Arts’ purchase of Criterion and its Renderware, which Rockstar used to create Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto Vice City, and Grand Theft Auto San Andreas.
Rockstar wasn’t at all keen to suddenly start paying licensing fees to use Renderware, especially for one of their biggest competitors at the time. Accepting Time Extensionthe interviewExplaining his reaction to the acquisition news, King said:
“I was working on Max Payne’s console at Rockstar in Vienna, and I got off the plane and Sam said, ‘Fucking EA just bought Renderware, we need to make our own engine, fix it!” So I was like ‘Cool, All right! So one of the reasons we love Rockstar San Diego is they have an amazing exporter, and we love Midtown Madness. So we brought the folks from Vienna Rockstar and Northern Rockstar to San Diego and we created RAGE. So, I account for building the original team and launching the next-generation engine that Rockstar still uses today. Then we had to go to Japan and play the PlayStation 3 first, when it was just a big silver box with a red button on it.
King also spoke in more detail about the thinking behind Table Tennis, and how it’s mostly about testing physics on new consoles.
“Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis is really a game that lets us physically show off or prove our game engine. It’s a nice, small, realistic thing to make in time, right? Because the PlayStation 3 It’s the whole cell processor architecture, if you’re an Xbox developer, you don’t sit down with Sony and see the bus and the SPU and all that, you have to be very disciplined to break down your code and send the instructions back to recompile. On the Xbox, You have three PowerPC dies, they can all see each other, your code is probably very sloppy.
For those who want to check out old trailers for the game, you cando this here.
Have you ever played Rockstar’s Table Tennis?
