Sony Isn’t Making It, So These Guys Are

Combat racing is about to be turned upside-down (again). By Luke Reilly

When it comes to futuristic racers, Psygnosis’ WipEout series is the big wheel down at the cracker factory. Sony’s Studio Liverpool née Psygnosis was shuttered in 2012 and the series itself has since slipped from the limelight, but WipEout’s legacy still looms large. Instrumental to the very success of the original PlayStation, WipEout is arguably Psygnosis’ chef-d'oeuvre.

But WipEout wasn’t the only futuristic racing series Psygnosis put its stamp on back in the late ’90s. There was another, with one key difference. This one actually had wheels.

Big ones.

Chris Mallinson renovates homes and, up until recently, he had no actual games industry experience. But he really, really loves Rollcage.

“Rollcage is my favourite racing game of all time,” he says. “Some of my fondest gaming memories are from blasting through Outworld while pumping the game’s stellar soundtrack.

Rollcage, built by now-defunct Warwickshire, UK-based developer Attention to Detail and published by Psygnosis, was released in 1999 for PlayStation and PC. It was well-received by critics and fans alike for its incredible sense of speed, its destructible scenery, and its eye-catching, wedge-shaped racing machines (and their enormous wheels that allowed them to flip and drive upside-down). It received a sequel the following year, Rollcage Stage II. But then, like hundreds and hundreds of fledgling franchises before and since, it just quietly faded away.

But Mallinson never quite let go of Rollcage and, while still searching online for some kind of a hint of another Rollcage sequel, he set in motion a series of events that are currently bringing about the game he was craving. It’s called Grip and, while it’s not an official sequel to Rollcage, it’s certainly its true spiritual successor.

“I’d been browsing the Internet, looking for evidence of even a sliver of hope for Rollcage 3, and I came across something called ‘Rollcage Redux’ being linked in the Rollcage Steam group,” explains Mallinson.

Here Mallinson discovered former Attention to Detail programmer Robert Baker, who also still had a candle burning for Rollcage. Baker had been contacted by hardcore Rollcage fans asking for his help to keep Rollcage running on drastically newer PC hardware, 15 years down the track.

[I]t’s very rare to play a game that is so old yet feels just as good today as it did back then. We really must have done something right with that game.

“I can’t speak for other developers, but for myself, I’ve worked on a dozen games and Rollcage is the only game that I’ve personally supported after release,” says Baker. “I don’t hold the source code to many games as that belongs to the company that develops these games of course, but Rollcage was a bit different.”

“A friend and I had a bit of a Rollcage obsession where we would play the game religiously in our post-pub crawls for about a year or two after release. It quickly became too easy for us so I modified the game at home to be more of a challenge and much faster than normal. This mode actually lives on in the Rollcage Redux build, under the ‘mynameisneo’ cheat code.

“The whole Redux thing came about after being contacted by a few fans, asking if it was possible to fix a few bugs that had crept in over the years as Windows evolved. I was a little concerned about publicly putting out a new build, but it had been so long since its initial release I really didn’t see what harm it could do. I enquired around with a couple of Sony contacts, and their advice was simply just don’t commercialise it, which of course was never the intention anyway, so there it lives.

Rollcage Redux supports higher resolutions and has a smoother framerate

“It’s quite a ride even now, it’s very rare to play a game that is so old yet feels just as good today as it did back then. We really must have done something right with that game, it’s still a ton of fun once you get used to the handling all over again!”

Impressed by Baker’s tenacity, Mallinson took a punt and sent him a message via Steam.

“A pretty disjointed and amateur proposal, to be honest,” he concedes. “I mean, here’s a home renovator with project management experience but no actual games industry experience pitching a video game project of decent scope to a 20 year game dev veteran.”

But it worked.

“Miraculously, [Baker] bought what I was selling and we started our journey into the development of Grip, him doing the code and me doing the art,” says Mallinson. “It never really dawned on me to try and make a Rollcage-esque game, but after seeing Rob's passion, I had tunnel vision.”

“The stars must have aligned somewhere because my first encounter with Rob was due to some pretty big luck.”

Mallinson and Baker settled on the name Caged Element for their new team and added a third member: Rollcage and Rollcage Stage II designer/producer David Perryman.

“My first job in the games industry was helping to make Rollcage,” says Perryman. “My last job in the games industry was helping to make Rollcage 3! Yes, Firebugs started out as Rollcage 3; however, since we wanted it to be a version of Rollcage accessible to a younger audience, it was rebranded as Firebugs.”

Firebugs was released in PAL territories in October 2002.

Since then, Perryman had pursued various projects outside the games industry. But when he saw what Mallinson and Baker had put together for Grip he wanted in.

“I’ve been friends with Rob since we worked on Rollcage together,” he says. “When he showed me what he and Chris had been working on, I was blown away. I dropped what I was working on and jumped on board.”

Three more faces have been added to the team since (“We got a lot of emails after the first trailer dropped,” says Mallinson) and they’re looking to add “a couple more to the pack.” But Mallinson wants to keep the Caged Element crew small for now.

“We’d like to keep it relatively small so that everyone involved feels like they have a big role in how the game actually turns out,” he says. “Everyone’s input is taken into consideration and helps shape the final game.”

So, after more than a decade, where does the desire to develop Grip come from? Is it that today’s tools and nimble distribution and crowdfunding platforms has enabled the team to revisit the Rollcage sequel ‘that got away’, so to speak, or has the Caged Element team looked around the racing genre with an eye to fill a hole? Or is it a bit of both?

We wanted a new version of the game that is fit for a modern audience and we knew many other people that wanted it as well.

“I think this one is very simple – we love Rollcage,” says Baker. “We wanted a new version of the game that is fit for a modern audience and we knew many other people that wanted it as well.”

“There really was no decision to be made; it was just desire to play this type of game again, and knowing the pleasure we would get in developing it along the way. The creative process has been extraordinary, and it’s only going to get better the further we get into it.”

“Technology and crowdfunding are certainly a great help to current indie devs, with Unreal Engine being such a great toolset, and gamers having the ability to voice their opinion early in development with their hard-earned cash,” says Mallinson. “I think it’s awesome that so many great games have come from Kickstarter campaigns; games that may have never seen the light of day otherwise.”

“As for Grip filling a hole in the racing genre with a big-ass, flippable car that shoots missiles, this definitely seemed like an opportune time to create this type of game. But I think we would have started developing it regardless of the current trends, since we just love Rollcage so much.”

“The community that formed around Rollcage has been quite strong for a long time,” explains Perryman. “There have been a couple of attempts by fans to make a modern version. I’ve periodically dipped in to see if I could help out, because I have this desire to play a modern version too.”

“It’s the only game I’ve played that really captures the sense of controlled chaos, that taps into the skill you need and feel of galloping a horse or controlling a bike down a mountain. After 15 years, there still isn’t anything that really captures that essence. So as Rob says, we love Rollcage and want to play it.”

The early shots of Grip look promising.

The greatest challenge for Grip so far has been the car physics.

“When I first picked up Unreal Engine and started experimenting with the vehicle physics that it provides, it wasn’t long before it became obvious that we were going to need something custom,” says Baker.

“We started over, building our own vehicle driving model on top of what Unreal had to offer. Things like tyre grip, steering, suspension, drag, down-force, artificially high gravity, engine propulsion, braking – everything – had to be realised in our own vehicle handling code.

I think what we’ve nailed so far is the racing intensity, and the feeling of driving a big death machine.

“Not only that, but we’ve still some problems with the physics that we can’t overcome without compiling our own modified version of the engine itself. This is something we’ve delayed until now for practical reasons, but [it’s] something we’re about to embark on as we can’t really delay it any further.

“So it’s been a challenge in some areas bringing Grip’s driving model to Unreal Engine – as it would be with any engine because of the nature of the physics – but Unreal offers so much in other ways that the work has been more than worth it. Now that we’re close to summiting the physics peak, the rest of the game will be a joy to develop.”

Despite the challenges, Mallinson is pleased with what they’ve achieved to date.

“I think what we’ve nailed so far is the racing intensity, and the feeling of driving a big death machine,” he says. “We had the car moving really fast early in dev, and once we added the machine gun and missiles, it was a whole new ball game. This wasn’t just a hobby project anymore; it was turning into an actual game, and a really fun one at that.”

“We’re still early in development, so vehicle handling and sense of speed is likely to change quite a bit, but we’re on the right track.”

Following the example etched in stone by the original WipEout and Rollcage games of the late ’90s, the soundtrack will be another important pillar of Grip. The Caged Element team describes the soundtrack in Grip as “something special”. Grip’s debut ‘Dance of Destruction’ trailer – which bleeds from the classical waltz stylings of The Blue Danube to something a touch… edgier – is just a first taste.

The overall feel of the soundtrack will be pretty industrial and gritty with a real driving force behind each track.

“I love the track OGRE Sound made for the trailer,” says Mallinson. “I came to him with the idea of transitioning Strauss’ Blue Danube into a wild DnB track and he hit it out of the park; he’d like to turn that into a full track for the game. Syncing the footage with those two songs was a hell of a lot of fun.”

“The roster of musicians for this game is nuts, really. We put a lot of effort into contacting some big names to attach to this game and I think it paid off. There’s so much amazing talent on-board, including Tech Itch and Dom & Roland, who were previously on the Rollcage Stage II OST.

“The overall feel of the soundtrack will be pretty industrial and gritty with a real driving force behind each track. Depending on our budget, [sound designer] Michael [Manning] may also have music change dynamically per situation. So if you catch big air there may be a muffling effect, or if you’re hit by a missile the beat may pick-up pace for a few seconds. Things like that. We’re excited.”

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