How the Roller Champions devs invented a new spectator sport

blog.playstation.com:

Roller Champions is coming to PS4 (and PS5 via backwards compatibility) on May 25, offering fast-paced, competitive, free-to-play matches in which you can rise to sports-legend glory. Its roller-skate arena action is based on three simple rules: catch the ball, do a lap while keeping it in your team’s possession, and score!

To better understand the game, its origins, and its gameplay decisions, we spoke with Gauthier Malou, Roller Champions’ creative director.

“Blending is at the core of Roller Champions,” says Malou, and that’s especially true when it comes to its origins, which combine inspirations as diverse as arcade games and a dystopian movie from the ‘70s. Before Roller Champions, Malou was part of a small team at Ubisoft tasked with two missions: create free mobile games, and keep an eye on the market to observe its trends. It was during this time that his team noticed that “the market was moving more and more towards interaction between players, spectators, and organizers,” he recalls, citing examples like Twitch and esports competitions.

“Streamers are like a Roman emperor who has to entertain the crowd,” says Malou, “and the more fun the game is to watch, the more viewers will ask the streamers to replay that game. So, at first, we thought of a classic gladiator game with swords.”

But the team wanted to approach the idea in a unique way, and that’s when Malou had a flash of inspiration: Rollerball, one of his favorite movies from the ‘70s. Depicting a dystopian world in which corporations take over and create spectacles to satiate the masses, the film is violent and dark – but that’s not what attracted him to it. 

“The fact that this movie had gladiators on roller skates in a circular arena, like Ben-Hur,