Why “Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis” is one of the best games of all time
Alright — I hear your cries. Calm down and let me explain.
Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis (rated E, might I add) is an obscure title. Alright, it’s a blatantly weird title, at best. At eye level, it’s just one of those weird games that a (now) triple A developer made in practice for a breakthrough title. Take Treyarch’s Max Steel: Covert Missions for example.
But RGPTT is different. It was the first game which employed the Rockstar Advanced Game Engine (or RAGE, for short). This, even though it seems stupid, it one of the most pivotal decisions Rockstar Games has ever made in their history as a studio. RAGE has birthed the biggest and most technically amazing contemporary Rockstar titles, such as GTA IV, Read Dead Redemption, Max Payne 3, and of course GTA V.
The RAGE is the response of Rockstar’s desire to create modular and efficient physics-based engine. Because RAGE is proprietary and very little is known about it, not much can be said in relation to how it was made, but the public does know that it utilizes aspects of the Euphoria engine as well as the Bullet physics engine, but Rockstar added their usual touch of magic and created a gorgeous masterpiece of technology out of them.
If you decide to delve into the filesystem of a RAGE based game, you’ll see that there is hundreds of files (of course). If you click the right combination of files, you’ll probably get yourself somewhere where you’ll find an RPF file
These RPF files contain multiple levels, all represented by files. Each of the levels may contain more RPF files or more types of files — and that’s the coolest part. RAGE allows for their files to associate with each other in a system only comparable to LEGO, but instead of bricks, it’s hundreds of RPF files.
RAGE also allows for incredibly versatile handling and physics asset creation. The ping pong ball in RGPTT and a Sultan RS from GTA IV both have the same core physics elements. If that isn’t incredible to you, I don’t know what is.
Sure, other devs have engines that do kind of the same thing, but RAGE was the first, and, with Rockstar showing it’s possible to adapt RAGE to different APIs with Max Payne 3’s upgrade to DirectX 11 and Stereoscopic 3D rendering, as well as it’s ability to add ambient occlusion and it’s ability to have been improved in relation to particle systems and lighting shows that it is truly the most versatile engine of it’s type.
Getting back to Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis — It really didn’t look to bad for being released in 2006. That’s also because of RAGE. Rockstar developed some proprietary files for RAGE which could be used to texture asset models (model files were also developed by Rockstar).
What I’m trying to get at here is the fact that the RAGE engine ascended the entire gaming platform from a static, boring, limited place to a place full of possibility and newly (and well) founded hype.
