“What a Save!” The words echo long after the desperate lunge that sent a wide shot into the top corner of the stadium. Rocket League: light of so many lives, killer of free time. This beautiful video game seems, like everything that appears perfect, to have arrived fully-formed.

While some things take time to appreciate, Rocket League hits you like a boosted dumper truck. Developed by San Diego-based studio Psyonix, it is a game that hooks within seconds and, hundreds of hours later, keeps getting better. Imagine football played by blisteringly fast, flight-capable cars and you’re pretty much there. Since release, the game has attracted over 20 million players, and has just seen its first world cup tournament – over 20,000 people took part. But behind the overnight success lie several false starts and, to channel Alan Hansen, a decade of grit and determination.

Psyonix founder Dave Hagewood, now CEO and Studio Director, got his break in the early 2000s as a modder – a fan who creates new levels and graphics for established games like Doom and Half-Life. Hagewood, though, worked on mods for Unreal, a sci-fi first-person shooter series famed for its spectacular visuals. It was a vital learning experience, and it got him his break into the industry.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Psyonix’s Jeremy Dunham, Dave Hagewood and Corey Davis Photograph: Psyonix

“I ended up adding vehicle support to Unreal Tournament 2003,” he says. “Epic Games had done some initial code for vehicles, so I took it from there and built a game mode. They wanted it to be a part of UT 2004, and I said I’d actually like to come and work on it in their offices. I worked there for about two years, almost as if I was an employee, and built the UT Onslaught mode.”

Onslaught was a vehicle-heavy multiplayer deathmatch mode, which let players drive into online combat in a variety of tanks and armoured jeeps. It was a huge hit with fans – big enough to give Hagewood the confidence to set up on his own. “I left and started Psyonix,” he says. “I hired guys from the local college scene and started an internship program. I couldn’t hire industry people, I couldn’t afford to pay them, and they wouldn’t work for a no-name company anyway.”

In 2005, Hagewood became certain that Epic’s powerful Unreal Engine 3 – a game development technology that the company licensed out to other studios – would become popular across the industry. Few outside of Epic itself knew its ins and outs like he did, so he started training his staff to use the application. He was right: UE3 became a staple engine, employed in hundreds of games. “We built the company on that engine, doing contract work for other studios,” he says. “Our goal was always to make our own products, but we kind of bootstrapped it to this work-for-hire. We always had some small part of us working on something original, though, because I had seen at Epic that the real key is owning your own IP.”

The team focused its creativity around the successful Onslaught concept, developing a basic idea of cars that could jump and boost, initially tied to more direct combat. “I would liken it to a mix between something like Twisted Metal and Smash Bros,” says Corey Davis, Psyonix’s design director. “You were on an open platform and the goal was to knock other cars to their death, but the boost would allow you to get back.” Various power-ups added to the game’s complexity, but everything changed when a ball was thrown in.

“We thought let’s put a ball in there and it might lead to a side mode or something in the game we were making,” says Hagewood. “[A]nd we couldn’t stop playing it. We got obsessed, we were having trouble getting people to work on the game instead of just playing it.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars was the 2008 predecessor to Rocket League. Photograph: Psyonix

The result was Rocket League’s predecessor, which would end up with the unfortunate title of Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle Cars (Battle Cars for short). Released on Playstation 3 in 2008, the multiplayer mode was basically Rocket League, but the emphasis was on a superfluous single-player mode and the media wasn’t interested. It attracted a small community of passionate players, but it never broke through.

Psyonix was convinced, however, that it had something special and began working on a follow-up. The initial concepts for Battle Cars 2 went in some unusual directions, such as an open-world where players would drive into stadiums to play. “We were trying to identify what we needed to do to make it work better this time,” says Hagewood. “We quickly realised some ideas were out of scope or maybe a little crazy, so eventually steered back and said look: we don’t want to change the game that we felt was so successful. Let’s polish what we have, keep that core, and just build the best experience on top of playing that game.”

This meant renewed focus on things like online infrastructure, which was totally reworked from Battle Cars. It meant throwing out all the single-player obstacle courses and mini-games in favour of a season mode that taught new players the ropes. Above all it meant putting multiplayer front and centre, alongside a vibrant and chunky visual style. “At that same back-to-basics meeting where we decided to focus on what we knew was good,” says Davis, “we also decided to embrace the spirit of the game which is maybe a little goofy – it’s cars hitting soccer balls, right? We tacked fully into hats and vibrant colours, and made it into something we would enjoy seeing. We didn’t worry too much about the seriousness of it.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest For Rocket League, Psyonix dialled up the humour, but slowed the pace to make the game more accessible. Photograph: Psyonix

Perhaps the most important change was to the pace – Rocket League is slower than Battle Cars. “The main change is how hard you hit the ball,” says Davis. “We had always played the game a little bit differently internally to what Battle Cars evolved into online. It became almost like pool where the good players got so good and could hit the ball so hard from anywhere on the field they could score from the opposite corner.

“We never quite reached that level of mastery and, almost by accident, that had made our play more team-based and we wanted that feeling in Rocket League: more emphasis on team-play and also more accessible for all skill levels. One of the downsides of Battle Cars is if you’re not very good, you will probably never touch the ball if someone better than you is playing. That can happen a tiny bit with Rocket League, but so much less so.”

What is easy to gloss over is that this process of refinement took place over seven years of development, while Psyonix did work-for-hire to pay the bills. This turned out to be a key factor in Rocket League’s exceptional level of polish, which is comparable to a great Nintendo game. “All our experience with other AAA companies doing contract work allowed us to train our team on hitting that really high bar,” says Hagewood. “We worked with Firaxis on XCOM, with Epic on Gears of War, many other studios, and we got to see what their processes and standards of quality were. So when it came time to remake our own game, we had the tools, expertise and new standards to hit that bar.”

All of this time, the team size remained small. “Before release I don’t think we ever had more than 15 people on it,” says Hagewood. “That was the absolute max, and most of the time it was far less than that.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Rocket League community has embraced the game’s humour and spirit. Photograph: Psynoix

Following alpha and beta periods, Rocket League launched in July 2015 on PC and PS4 – the latter as part of Sony’s PS+ service, meaning it was available free for a month. This was a controversial gamble internally, but Psyonix made the call that jump-starting the console playerbase would lead to greater things. For the thousands of players who discovered it in this way, Rocket League came from nowhere and was an instant smash.

Player numbers were so high at launch that the servers crashed. “I realised it was a huge success when we didn’t go home for days,” laughs Psyonix vice president, Jeremy Dunham. “We were really worried because we knew this could affect people’s perception and we had to fix it and get on top of it, but what turned that around is people liked it so much they were actually very supportive, unlike a lot of other game launches that run into similar issues. Then I realised the community was really behind it and we had to do whatever we could to keep them happy.”

Psyonix had almost seamlessly transitioned from a small studio doing contract work into one supporting its own online behemoth. The post-launch strategy splits along simple lines: players pay upfront for the game and receive all content updates for free, but certain cosmetic items (such as the Back to the Future DeLorean) can be bought.

“The key to keeping a community happy is giving them regular and constant reasons to be happy,” says Dunham. “We were never big on doing what many games do which is sell absolutely everything post-release, particularly maps, because that’s the kind of thing that divides your audience every time you release them. So we let the community stay involved in everything we update, while we also release things for sale that are optional and allow players to express themselves.”



Ultimately, the player numbers show Psyonix is doing something right. In industry terminology Rocket League is a ‘sticky’ game, which means that it is played regularly by a lot of people. Vitally for the YouTube gaming generation, it lends itself well to short videos of amazing goals or saves, quickly shared around social media or gaming networks. This, alongside the game’s high design quality, means the usual rules for video game popularity and sales (a few weeks of intense action followed by months of managed decline) don’t apply. The recent Rocket League Championship Series, a professionally-produced tournament with gorgeously-skilled players, only emphasised the game’s potential as an eSport – not least in the fact it’s so instantly readable, unlike many currently-popular eSports.

Rocket League is an ongoing word-of-mouth success and, as it ages, it is acquiring players faster than ever before: 20 million players is the most recent number. Psyonix makes a point of updating on the millions, and Dunham says to expect another announcement “in the next couple of weeks”.

While its success may seem effortless, Rocket League represents at least a decade of investment and learning on the part of Psyonix. Call it what you will – a vision the studio believed in, persistence paying off, or simply a victory for great design and refinement. “The success has made us a Rocket League studio, at least for the moment,” says Hagewood. “We have made the decision that Rocket League deserves to be a live game. It’s not even that we want it to be a live game, it just is a live game – that’s why we’re doing all the updates and continuing to support it.”

However, even though most of the studio now works on its flagship title, Hagewood still remembers the lesson he learned at Epic: to keep innovating on popular concepts. Hence, a small team at Psyonix keeps working on whatever’s next.

So does this still feel like the small studio that first started working on weird vehicle combat games? “We had to scale,” Hagewood says, “otherwise we couldn’t keep it – it would’ve collapsed under its own weight. But we’re being very critical about that and we’re trying to be innovative, this is a real opportunity, because we have the funding to construct this studio in a way where we’re not just a victim of whatever circumstances come about. We can actually say, this is how the ideal studio should be. So let’s build that. It’s exciting and scary, but a really cool time.”

Rocket League’s new ‘Rumble’ update is due out on 8 September

