Twenty years ago, Rockstar Table Tennis paved the way for GTA 6

Rockstar Games was a different company twenty years ago. It was certainly best known as the creator of Grand Theft Auto. GTA3, Vice cityAnd San Andreas had utterly dominated the PlayStation 2 generation and turned the video game industry, not to mention the art form, on its head in a now barely believable period of just three years. But as a publisher and developer, Rockstar has also brought a lot of other things to the market: the Midnight Club racing games, a game based on a cult film from the 1970s. The WarriorsRemedy’s Max Payne series, the infamous snuff stealth game Quest. It wasn’t as monolithic as it is today.

Still, I remember the shocked reaction when it unveiled its debut title for the next generation of consoles: Rockstar Games presents table tennis.

This was not at all what anyone expected. There was no violence, no wit, no cinematic ambition, no ironic humor. It turned out Table tennis was a deadly serious and extremely realistic simulation of a sport that no one else had thought to simulate.

I remember treating the game with a kind of bemused amusement at the time. Not because it was bad; it wasn’t. Table tennis was and remains a deep, technical, fast-paced and incredibly fun one-on-one sports game. It has a deceptive simplicity – with just a few characters and options, including a robust online mode – and a focused presentation. But you only have to take a few steps into the tutorial to see how seriously the nuances of the sport are taken. And you only have to play it with friends to realize how intensely competitive it can be. (It is playable on Xbox via backwards compatibility and available in stores.)

Image: Rockstar Games

I went to a launch party for the game in London where there was heavy fighting Table tennis tournament with an Xbox 360 as the main prize. It was as much fun watching the games as participating, and the room was buzzing. But still, the journalists present nudged each other, laughed and asked the question: Why?

The story at the time was that everyone at Rockstar loved table tennis and just wanted to do the sport justice. It was certainly easy to imagine it being widely played in the company’s offices from Edinburgh to New York. And while Table tennis had a different attitude from the company’s other games, but still had an ineffable coolness – plus the slightest hint of GTA’s satirical sneer in the conception of its characters, like the towering, Nordic Jesper and Luc with his dorky ponytail.

The real reason for it Table tennisHowever, the development remained hidden in plain sight. Rockstar even owned it during job interviews. The company wanted to quickly gain insight into the new generation of consoles while it was still in its infancy: Table tennis was exclusive to Xbox 360, because PS3 wasn’t even out yet. (A Wii version would be released the following year.) The sports simulation was a very focused way to show what the hardware would be capable of, especially when it came to realistic human characters.

Image: Rockstar Games

There was an extra layer of urgency to this task for Rockstar – and that’s what it delivers Table tennis its historical significance. Up until that point, GTA had been created in the RenderWare engine, created by developer Criterion Games. Criterion was bought by rival publisher EA in 2004. Rockstar anticipated this and wanted its own engine and bought Angel Studios, with whom it had collaborated on the games Smuggler’s Run and Midnight Club, and which had its own internal engine.

Angel was renamed Rockstar San Diego and tasked with building new engine technology, which became the Rockstar Advanced Game Engine (RAGE). And the first game made in RAGE, in-house at Rockstar San Diego? Rockstar Games presents table tennis.

Table tennis was a perfect testing ground for technology that would power an era of unparalleled success for Rockstar. RAGE came to power GTA4 And 5, Red Dead redemption and its sequel. The latest evolution of RAGE will debut later this year GTA6which is expected to be the biggest entertainment launch of all time. And it’s all thanks to a little ping pong simulator.

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