10 years later, no one has replicated Rocket League’s mojo

Rocket League released July 7, 2015, and with its big 10th birthday around the corner, Psyonix has dedicated the latest season to celebrating the milestone. Has it been that long already?

I’ve shamefully been letting my rocket-powered battle car collect rust so far this year, but I used to play Rocket League almost daily, finding my niche in the Snow Day mode, which replaces the soccer ball with a puck (a superior sports object).

In fact, Psyonix’s decision to graduate Snow Day from a casual extra mode to a full-fledged ranked playlist probably affected my life more than any other decision by a game developer, given how much of an obsession it became for me and my teammates.

One thing that’s surprised me over the past 10 years I’ve spent playing and covering Rocket League is how few imitators it’s had. You’d really think there’d be more, because it happens with every other successful game: there was a MOBA boom, a battle royale boom, a soulslike boom, a “survivorlike” boom. Where’s the rocketlike boom?

A couple of games that do come to mind are Hockey? and Slapshot. Both are multiplayer hockey games that are physics-based like Rocket League, demanding awkward manual control of one player. The creator of Hockey?, Alex Austin, has made lots of other experimental physics games, and just today posted a montage of dunks that has me excited for whatever he’s up to.

But those games, cool as they are, aren’t really attempts to do what Rocket League does. The closest a game has come to replicating the Rocket League phenomenon may be one launching right now: Sloclap’s new soccer game, Rematch. It’s in advanced access on Steam, and seems poised to be a hit after successful betas.

Like Rocket League, Rematch is a multiplayer team sports game in which each human player controls one virtual player, but I can’t quite call it a rocketlike, because it isn’t physics-based in the way Rocket League is. (And also there are no rockets, or cars, if we consider that a necessity.)

It’s a testament to Rocket League’s influence that when I first saw Rematch, a game about regular human beings playing soccer, I thought, ‘ah, it’s like Rocket League without cars’ rather than ‘ah, it’s like soccer.’

Maybe the Platonic ideal of all sports is a version of them played with rocket cars, and only Psyonix realizes this?

Happy birthday, Rocket League. I’d better not see any Rule 1 breakers out there on its big day, and if I do you better believe I’ll say: Wow! Wow! Wow! No way! Okay.