Rocket League Interview

The awesome, long-awaited sequel to Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars.

It was a happy accident. We were originally developing a different kind of car game altogether (if you want to check it out, we uploaded video of it for a #ThrowbackThursday event a few months ago) and one of our level designers had an idea. "What if we dropped a ball in here?" It was just an attempt at messing around in-between our planned daily workload, but something amazing happened -- using the cars to hit the ball was a lot more fun than the game we were already making. We put some soccer-style goals in the game as well and we had even more fun and it just snowballed from there. It's now almost seven years, two million-plus downloads, and tens of millions of games later, and here we are -- finishing up the sequel to a game we didn't even know we were going to make. That's pretty remarkable.

It's been great. Our longtime fans can't wait to get their hands on the finished version of the game. We get messages on our forums, Twitter, and Facebook pages begging us for an official release date on an almost-daily basis. That makes us feel pretty good. Knowing that our fans want to play the game so badly is a good sign, for sure. But one other positive sign for us is how excited other members of our industry, other developers, are for Rocket League. When we were at the PlayStation Experience in December and The MIX/ GDC in March, we had a lot of other game companies telling us how much they liked it. Publishers were asking us if we wanted representation, etc. It has left us super-excited about the game's potential.

That's a great question, and one that depends a lot on our audience. Six months from now, Rocket League will have been released and we'll be looking at a lot of the feedback from our players, analyzing a lot of the data we accrue from the gameplay sessions, and really discussing what players want to keep the game evolving. We have some rough ideas about the sorts of add-ons and DLC we'd like to support, but we don't want to get ahead of ourselves either. We're getting very close to "feature complete" now and then we move on to "content complete" before moving into the PlayStation certification phase over the next month-plus, so that's our focus for now. It is, however, a strong desire of our team to keep the game going with new content far after its release.

PlayStation 4 and PC. We went with PS4 because we knew that we already had an existing fan base on PlayStation because of the success of Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars, plus Sony has been pro-Rocket League for quite some time now. It was a natural fit. Going to PC allows us to reach a completely different type of gamer than we did before, and it's a huge audience to boot. We have considered and are considering other platforms too, but because of our smaller team size, we need to avoid biting off more than we can chew.

We certainly hope so. We already know that Soccer is a very watchable sport, and that motorsports is also very watchable, so we think the two together combine that watchability and competitiveness for something that people will really embrace. We already have hints that it lends itself well to the eSports scene because we are asked this question quite often. If people are always asking us about it as much as they do, then it's likely because they see that potential too... at least, that's what we're hoping.

Definitely. There will be at least 10 different vehicles and a handful of arenas at launch, and we have plans to release even more stadiums as free DLC in the future. That's one of our big promises: Once you own Rocket League you won't ever have to pay for another map again after that -- we don't want to split our audience.