Rockstar Games was a different company 20 years ago. It was most famous as the maker of Grand Theft Auto, for sure. GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas had utterly dominated the PlayStation 2 generation and upended the video game industry, not to mention the artform, in the now-scarcely-believable span of just three years. But as a publisher and developer, Rockstar also put out a bunch of other stuff: the Midnight Club racing games, a game based on cult ’70s movie The Warriors, Remedy’s Max Payne series, the infamous snuff stealth game Manhunt. It wasn’t as monolithic as it is now.
Even so, 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 anybody had expected. There was no violence, no edginess, no cinematic ambition, no ironic humor. It turned out that Table Tennis was a deadly serious and painstakingly realistic simulation of a sport nobody else had thought to simulate.
I remember covering the game at the time with a kind of baffled amusement. Not because it was bad; it very much 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 need to go a few steps into the tutorial to see how seriously it takes the nuances of the sport. And you only need to play it with friends to realize how intensely competitive it can be. (It’s playable on Xbox via backward compatibility, and available in the store.)
I went to a launch party for the game in London, where there was a hard-fought Table Tennis tournament with an Xbox 360 as the grand prize. It was as fun to watch the matches as to participate in them, and the room was buzzing. But still, the journos present nudged each other, and laughed, and asked the question: why?
The narrative at the time was that everybody at Rockstar loved table tennis and just wanted to do the sport justice. It was certainly easy to imagine it being played a lot in the company’s offices, from Edinburgh to New York. And while Table Tennis had a different attitude to the company’s other games, it still had an ineffable cool about it — plus the slightest hint of GTA’s satirical smirk in the conception of its characters, like the towering, Nordic Jesper, and Luc with his dorky ponytail.
The true reason for Table Tennis‘ development was hiding in plain sight, however. Rockstar even owned up to it in interviews. The company wanted to quickly get its head around the new generation of consoles while it was in its infancy: Table Tennis was exclusive to Xbox 360, by virtue of the fact that PS3 wasn’t even out yet. (There would be a Wii version the following year.) The sports sim was a very focused way to show what the hardware would be capable of, particularly when it came to realistic human characters.
There was another layer of urgency to this task for Rockstar — and this is what gives Table Tennis its historical significance. Up to that point, GTA had been made in the RenderWare engine, created by developer Criterion Games. Criterion was bought by rival publisher EA in 2004. Anticipating this, and wanting an engine of its own, Rockstar bought Angel Studios, which it had worked with on the Smuggler’s Run and Midnight Club games, and which had its own in-house engine.
Angel was renamed Rockstar San Diego and tasked with building new engine tech, 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 test bed for tech which would underpin an era of unparalleled success for Rockstar. RAGE went on to power GTA 4 and 5, Red Dead Redemption and its sequel. Later this year, the latest evolution of RAGE will debut with GTA 6, which 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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