In the spring of 2006, Rockstar Games took the world by surprise when they released what still stands out today as one of the studio’s oddest and most unexpected games, namely Table Tennis. A proper love letter to the sport with a depth and complexity that would have impressed even Jan-Ove Waldner. It was certainly not what was expected from the developer who previously almost exclusively gave the world one violent action game after another. So what exactly were the reasons behind the odd project?
In an interview with IGN recently, Rockstar founder Sam Houser talked about how the studio wanted to do something radically different that demonstrated the possibilities of the new generation of consoles and had the following to say:
“We absolutely love table tennis and wanted to try and make something that could show the audience what could be possible in the next generation of videogames.”
However, that does not seem to be the whole truth and Jamie King, who also co-founded Rockstar, mentions that the game was mainly created to demonstrate the power of their then-new RAGE engine, which later also became the basis for both Grand Theft Auto IV, Grand Theft Auto V, Red Dead Redemption, and Red Dead Redemption 2. King also said RAGE was created primarily in response to Electronic Arts buying up Criterion and their Renderware, something Rockstar used to create Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto Vice City , and Grand Theft Auto San Andreas.
Because one thing was certain in any case, and that was that Rockstar wasn’t the least bit eager to suddenly start paying license money to use Renderware, especially not to what was at the time one of their biggest rivals. In a interview with Time Extension, King explained his reaction when the news of the acquisition was made public, saying the following:
“I was in Rockstar Vienna working on the ports for Max Payne for consoles and I got off the plane and Sam’s like, ‘Fucking EA’s just bought Renderware, we need to make our own engine, sort it out!” So I’m like ‘Cool, okay!’ And so, one of the reasons that we loved Rockstar San Diego was they had an amazing exporter and we loved Midtown Madness. So, we brought people from Rockstar Vienna and Rockstar North to San Diego and we created RAGE. So I helped build that initial team and the beginnings of the next-gen engine that Rockstar still use today. And then we got to go to Japan and play with the PlayStation 3 before anyone else when it was just a big silver box with a red button.”
King also spoke in more detail about the ideas behind Table Tennis and how it was mainly about testing physics on the new consoles.
“Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis was really a game for us to show off or prove our game engine from a physics perspective. It was a nice and small and realistic thing to make in time, right? Because the PlayStation 3 was that whole cell-processor architecture where if you were an Xbox developer and you hadn’t sat down with Sony and seen the bus and the SPUs and whatever, you had to be so disciplined about how you broke down your code and sent the instructions off to come back and recompile. On an Xbox, you had three PowerPC chips and they could all see each other, you could be very sloppy with your code.”
For those of you who want to check out the old trailer for the game, you can do so here.
What are your fondest memories of the early years of Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, and did you play Rockstars Table Tennis at the time?
