Rollerdrome Is The Agony of Mixing Sports and Business
Beneath the exterior of “Tony Hawk with guns” lies a powerfully eloquent examination of what happens when sport and commerce intertwine.
First Released: August 16th, 2022
Platforms: PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC
There’s a purity to sports. At their most fundamental level—ie: on the field, during each play—there’s an unblemished beauty to these competitions. Sports are these remarkably transparent tests of skill and strength and strategy that highlight the occasionally transcendent nature of the human spirit. That’s why millions of people love them.
But most sports, as we know them today, see this purity buried beneath layers and layers of commerce. Most sports today are the subject of billion dollar entertainment enterprises—businesses designed to extract profit from that purity. Sometimes the infusion of large sums of money is beneficial to a sport. Sometimes it’s blatantly corrupting. And sometimes, as is so often the case in this age of sportswashing and NIL funds, the line is blurry.
Nothing I’ve encountered captures the intricacies of this dynamic better than Rollerdrome. Although on the outside this game appears to be a simple PS2-era action title, if you look deeper you’ll find an experience that captures the collision of sports and commerce with a voice that feels gong-ringingly, lighting-strikingly true.
Rollerdrome manages this feat by highlighting the tension between a sport itself and what happens off-field. The gameplay here is, as you may have heard before: “Tony Hawk with guns.” You rollerskate around an arena shooting enemies and performing tricks. But what that description 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. The game’s mentally all-consuming action, when combined with the subtle bits of stadium ephemera (the rhythmically stomping crowd, the uncaring, echoey voice that intones your name when you complete a level, the visible presence of cameras and lights pointing at you), 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 made me feel as if I was physically competing under the glare of a stadium spotlight.
But then, between these levels, you are occasionally presented with powerfully concise narrative sections where you learn about the context surrounding the sport. You discover that a megacorporation recently bought the league you’re playing in and is planning to use it as either a propaganda tool or a distraction from their goal of privatizing domestic law enforcement. You see dissenting athletes silenced and hand-picked competitors ascend. You see how the beauty of your beloved sport is being corrupted. And you are powerless to stop it. On the field, you are swift and efficient, enacting your will upon your opponents. But off the field, you are the one acted upon. Jarring developments hit you without warning and your choices for interaction are limited to actions that are symbolic at best.
The way these narrative sections braid together with the gameplay makes this experience greater than the sum of its parts. The subject this game explores 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? And how better to explore how that feeling is leveraged and corrupted by outside forces than to place you in rooms where the evidence of that corruption is all around you, staring you in the face? 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 and you’re given a choice to reflect your reaction to what you’re hearing. Though this moment is simple and almost trite, it also provides that rare sensation 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 made my choice and the credits began to roll.
I’m not sure that I can ask for anything more from any work of art.