Rocket League Founder explains bizarre Big Bang moment that sparked ‘Soccar’

Every two years, a renowned gaming studio called Double Fine drops everything it is doing to have a massive festival of creativity, splitting into teams to pitch brand-new games. Some rock for a short time, others span into fully-fledged updates for games like Psychonauts 2. This bizarre celebration of skill and talent is also exactly what spawned ‘Soccar’, as Rocket League Founder Adam Beckwith has taken to social media to explain how the concept of flying car football was formed.

Nowadays, Soccar has evolved into a gargantuan platform hosting millions of players every week. But how did it all form? Was it as simple as watching Jeremy Clarkson on Top Gear smashing an inflatable ball with a Kia? Was it an RC car rolling over a particularly large rock that served as the Isaac Newton moment?

Or, was it more a brainwave harbored by creativity, entertainment, and physics? Well, one Rocket League Founder explains how it was exactly that.

Original Rocket League Founder Reveals How Psyonix birthed Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars

Two decades ago, Psyonix was a team of developers working as a contractor for Epic Games, helping develop Unreal Engine titles. Picking up jobs on Gears of War and Unreal Tournament, the team quickly found its niche with vehicular combat games.

Using the Epic-developed software, the studio developed a Halo-like vehicle shooter, Onslaught. Then continued expanding its work car mods, trying SSX Tricky-styled stunts in a bid to find their next party title. The original design pitched to Epic was a mode where these cars would be dropped into a ‘swiss cheese’ battle arena to smash each other off the map. A four-wheeled Fall Guys, in essence.

But on a weekly fun day, brothers Adam Beckwith (Senior Artist) and Ben Beckwith (Technical Artist) got experimental, and it instantly caught on within the Pysonix studio.

“Every Monday, we’d all come in and experiment with game ideas, and we’d all essentially create mini-games using Unreal Engine’s Kismet system,” he said on X (previously Twitter).

“On Kiz-Monday, my Brother & I decided to drop a physics sphere into an open environment & we started knocking it around.

“Soon after, we threw in some walls & goals, which is when we saw the potential & got the programmers involved to help with the ball physics- all in a day’s work.”

And so, Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars was born.

In an old interview with Noclip, Psyonix CEO Dave Hagewood claimed that ‘nobody got any work done’ for two weeks straight whilst playing this new concept, and they were forced to go back to investors and reveal their game had completely changed.

How SARPBC Became Rocket League

Initially launching in 2008, SARPBC didn’t hit the mainstream media. Despite getting a small devoted player base that would continue to enjoy the game for years after Psyonix moved back to contract work to keep the lights on, the scalability simply didn’t take off.

But the concept was a goldmine.

So, years later, the studio revisited the concept and took their AAA Gears of War experience to polish the entire experience. Initially, there was a GTA-styled open-world element to drive between maps, but they focused on refining the gameplay, audio, user interfaces, and post-launch content.

Using Sony’s PlayStation Plus scheme to market the game in exchange for a free month of gameplay, the new SARPBC reboot, now named Rocket League, was an instant hit, with over 150,000 people loading up on day one, causing a server meltdown. One year later, 22 million players had enjoyed Soccar.

Since then, the ball has never rolled back, and the product has become a blockbuster title, headlining the Esports World Cup, being integrated into Olympic events, and being played in the biggest arenas in the world.

As for the Beckwith brothers, Adam and Ben still thrive inside the Psyonix and Epic Games team, and are immortalized with Rocket League Founder status thanks to the popular in-game arena Beckwith Park, based on their local soccer pitch in Washington.