Rumbleverse slams onto the scene with melee mayhem

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Rumbleverse, the new game from Iron Galaxy, is a unique take on the battle royale. You and 39 other players launch out of a cannon into Grapital City. Once you hit the ground, instead of searching for guns, you search for power ups and melee weapons. You must defeat any players you encounter in your journey to become the champion of the rumble. You see, Rumbleverse is a melee brawler royale.

I had the chance to talk, via Zoom, with Rumbleverse’s lead designer Adam Heart about fighting games, netcode, and more. The following is an edited transcript of our discussion.

GamesBeat: How did you folks come up with the idea for a melee battle royale?

Adam Heart: Melee combat is in our DNA. <Laugh> We did [Street Fighter III] Third Strike Online back in the day. We did Divekick. It’s just something we’re very close to. I feel like we’ve always been on the forefront of really high quality net play as well for these games. And it’s important to us. We’re very passionate about it. I’m very picky about it myself. Many years of, ”Hey, what if we did more than two players and try to make the netcode good. How can we do that?” And those types of conversations were always kicking around. Then, as the story goes, at a bar one night, co-CEO Chelsea Blasko says to co-CEO Adam Boyes, “let’s do a wrestling battle royale.” They thought that was funny enough to bring to some of the engineers and designers to pitch around. And we thought it was funny too. But we also thought probably not possible. <Laugh> Yeah. And then they pitched it and we got funding for it. We were