The making of Rocket League

October 7, 2020 From the vaults: this feature was originally published on February 16, 2016.

Did you know Rocket League is a sequel? If you've heard of 2008's Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars, then the answer is probably yes. If not, you might be surprised to know that over two million people downloaded the now eight years old PS3-exclusive and forerunner to last year's cars-in-a-cage slant on football that launched developer Psyonix into stardom.

Let me be frank with you: I was aware that Battle-Cars existed before, but had no idea until well after Rocket League's release last July that the two were related. And yet they're almost the same game.

"This time I think we were just able to do everything right across the board, whereas before we had a much smaller team," Psyonix's director of development Thomas Silloway suggests. "This time, we made a really good game, we had a really good marketing plan for getting the word out there, and then it kind of went viral as we were getting close to release. A bunch of people picked it up on Twitch from our betas and it just started getting a lot of hype."

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