Rollcage

Making Of

According to David Perryman, then a level designer at the Attention To Detail studio, the game's origins come from one of the studio's regular game pitching evenings. Steve Bennett had invented a new method of pushing polygons through the PlayStation at a ludicrously fast speed. Together with Stuart Tilley they pitched that technology as a racing game with destruction in it. They called it "Wrecked on Speed" and at that point it consisted only fast cars with a ton of downforce able to drive on walls and blow stuff up. After a period of pitching the game to publishers under the name "G-FX" (G-Force Extreme), the team was signed up by Psygnosis and the game was renamed "Rollcage" - a suggestion from Alan Bunker, head producer at Psygnosis Stroud.

During the development process, programmers encountered the problem with some cumbersome and clunky behaviour of the cars' objects when they exited a tunnel while driving on the wall. The solution was to rotate the object and, together with the toy of the Ricochet remote control car that flips over when colliding with wall which was brought to studio by John Meegan (external producer at Psygnosis), the idea of the shape of the cars was born. It was a compromise between the solution to the technical problem, and the lack of any real idea as to how the cars should look like.