Rollerdrome

Beneath the simple exterior of “Tony Hawk with guns” lies a powerfully eloquent examination of what happens when sport, commerce, and politics intertwine.

Rollerdrome has perhaps the simplest pitch ever: it’s Tony Hawk with guns. You rollerskate around an arena shooting enemies and, when you need to reload your guns, you perform a trick to magically acquire more ammo. It’s a conceit that sounds, if not completely like a parody, at least like the kind of game that’s trying to replicate the experiences of the PS2 era, when games offered one central, arcade-style mechanic, adorned only with enough narrative to generally contextualize what was happening.

Rollerdrome, however, is much, much more than this elevator pitch implies. Though the game does offer straight forward videogame-ey action and simple bits of story, the effect those two elements have and the way they are combined makes for something significantly deeper and richer than just “Tony Hawk with guns.” The combination of this game's action and narrative creates a thoughtful, intelligent work that captures, in a way that feels gong-ringingly, lightning-strikingly true, the complex tangle created when sports, commerce, and politics intertwine.

Yes, the gameplay side of Rollerdrome is the Max Payne/Tony Hawk hybrid that the marketing promises. But what that marketing doesn’t tell you is that this action elicits, in a shockingly tangible way, the exhilaration and excitement of participating in a beloved spectator sport. It is not an exaggeration to say that Rollerdrome makes you feel like you are pushing your body to the limit in a professional arena. Many times, as the bright yellow “PASSED” screen appeared at the end of a level, I would reach my hand to my forehead to wipe away a bead of sweat only to realize my skin was dry. Rollerdrome’s action didn’t just get my heart pumping or tie my stomach in knots, it recalled the actual sensations of exertion that I get whenever I physically play a sport.

I won’t try to craft a scientific theory on how Rollerdrome manages to be so affective, but I will point out that Roll7’s dedication to what they call “flow state gaming” probably has something to do with it. This state of being, which they describe as “zen-like focus” (and Rollerdrome absolutely induces) must envelop your mind so completely that the demands on the thinking region of your brain overflow and trickle into the physical movement areas. The way this game simultaneously asks you to navigate your character around the arena, strategize how to attack your enemies, remember what tricks you’ve done, and execute your movements with perfect timing becomes overwhelming yet intuitive—a combination that feels similar to the act of synchronizing all the parts of your body to chase and catch a ball.

If Rollerdrome were just this brilliantly physical action title, it would still be quite an accomplishment. But Rollerdrome is also one of the most compelling narrative games I’ve ever played. Throughout your time with Rollerdrome, you’ll occasionally come across short narrative sections where you explore an area set behind the scenes of Rollerdrome’s on-the-field action. In these moments, you simply meander around your environment and inspect items, each of which has a short comment that appears when you interact with it. After a few minutes, you eventually make your way into an arena and begin a new level.

Everything about these sequences are short. Snippets of radio broadcasts last less than a minute. Most item descriptions are only a sentence or two, with many consisting of just a few words. But this brevity isn’t due to laziness or even just a desire to get out of the player's way. These sequences are short because they include only what is absolutely necessary. There is no fluff here, no filler. Each description is like a perfectly worded poem with no syllable wasted. Each area is a perfect life-size diorama with no corners or crevices where you could get lost, stuck, or bored.

The result of this conciseness is that these sequences are shockingly powerful. The story told throughout these narrative sections is not particularly groundbreaking (it is, at its core, a somewhat standard David vs. Goliath tale set in yet another post-capitalist dystopian apocalypse) but it is told with such verve and astuteness that it feels revolutionary. This restraint makes each narrative development cut like a scalpel. At one point during my playthrough, a simple three word headline printed on a newspaper shattered me with grief, leaving me staring slack jawed at the screen for what felt like an eternity, paralyzed by having to wrap my head around a new understanding of this world.

But it’s not just these walking simulator-style sections that make the game thoughtful and interesting, it’s the way these sections braid together with the gameplay to create something greater than the sum of their parts. The tale this game tells of a corporation buying up a sport in order to cleanse its image and distract from its politics is one that has a lot of real world parallels, but the conflict at the heart of those stories is rarely captured with the precision Rollerdrome offers. How better to explain the pure, unfiltered exhilaration of playing, or even simply watching a sport than to provide gameplay that conveys that rush in a way that feels physical? And how better to explore how that pure feeling is leveraged and corrupted by outside forces than to place you in rooms where the evidence of that corruption is all around you, impacting you, jabbing you with tiny, poetic knives? Rollerdrome swirls these together, this purity and this corruption, mixing their flavors, giving you that rare concoction that tastes unmistakably like the nuanced, complete reality we so rarely glimpse in our fractured, siloed, postmodern age.

Perhaps the best example of how this combination works can be found in the game’s concluding moment. As your body is still unwinding from the tension of beating the final level, you find yourself listening to an audio message from a character you’ve never met before. You are given a symbolic choice as you listen to the message that corresponds to your reaction to what you’re hearing. Though the choices reflecting your reaction are binary, this moment provided me with that extremely rare feeling where you experience every contradictory emotion at once: victory and defeat, joy and sorrow, happiness and anger, catharsis and the sting of a wound still open. It was a fleeting, perfect moment where I felt everything all at once. I felt that feeling, I made my choice, and then the credits rolled.

I’m not sure that I can ask for anything more from any work of art.

Chris on Videogames is a new kind of videogame criticism that examines the medium through The Experience of Art.