Rocket League: The long road to overnight success

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It's the kind of stunt a beleaguered producer at Top Gear might, in a flash of inspiration, devise over a steak dinner: "I've got it! Football, but, wait for it, played with cars!" The joke works because cars are not designed to spin on a heel and change direction mid-sprint. They cannot, typically, leap, salmon-like, into a diving header. The angled bodywork of a sedan does not encourage predictable rebounds or strikes. On the football pitch, a vehicular head-on-collision will likely result in more than a mere crimson card. And yet, as Rocket League, the smash hit car-footie video game of the summer, of which more than 200 million matches have been played by six million players since July, demonstrates, from these physical limitations wonderful opportunity arises.
Indeed, for the game's Californian creator Psyonix, the game has become a serious business. Since Rocket League's launch July the studio has been courted with movie proposals, plans for television series, pitches from toy manufacturers and endless, endless merchandising opportunities. Its success has enabled the studio to fulfil its dream of transitioning from a work-for-hire outfit to, as founder Dave Hagewood puts it, "a truly independent self-funded developer." It has, in other words, changed everything. Even so, Rocket League started as a joke, an Easter Egg that, in its dazzling brilliance, grew to take over the game in which it squatted.
Putting cars in places they shouldn't be has defined Hagewood's career. The designer started out as an amateur modder for Unreal Tournament 2003. His best-known mod was an entirely new game mode, dubbed Onslaught, which added cars and other vehicles to the game. It brought him to the attention of Unreal's developer, Epic Games, who hired him to work for them, bringing the mode to Unreal Tournament 4. "My goal was always to build my own studio, however, so I used that success to start a team of Unreal Engine experts," says Hagewood. Psyonix, as the studio was known, took on contract work such as Vampire Hunter: The Dark Prophecy to stay afloat, while creating demos in downtime, in search of a homegrown hit, something that, as Hagewood puts it, could become "the next big thing."
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