The games that are as close as you can get to playing Rollerball
The futility of the individual sure is a lot of fun.
The 1975 film Rollerball -- you know, the one where James Caan and company skated around an arena with the aim of sticking balls into the opponent's goal as an attempt to prove the futility of the individual -- is quite the influential movie as far as video games go, seeing as it pretty much inspired the whole "future sports" sub genre of often violent, ball-based games. Without Rollerball, chances are we wouldn't have the likes of Speedball 2, or maybe even something like Rocket League today -- it all ends up going back to this movie.
There's a couple of strange things about Rollerball, as it goes -- the first one being that apparently the game itself was legitimately a lot of fun, and the cast and crew of the film often used to play it between takes. Once the film became a success, there was even a couple of people floating the idea of creating an actual Rollerball league -- something that utterly horrified the director of the film, Norman Jewison (seeing as "Rollerball is a fun sport!" is not exactly the point of the movie). Another curious thing is that while the aesthetics of Rollerball have inspired no end of futuristic sports game? There's never been any attempt to create a proper Rollerball video game, and until recently I wasn't even aware of any that directly tried to emulate this fictional deathride...until now.
As it happens, there are two old computer games that flat-out ape Rollerball -- first up, there's Rocketball for the C64, which is actually one of the first futuresports games around. The aim of the game is exactly like the film -- you ride in one direction around the track, and you have to throw the ball into the opponent's goal...naturally the opponent will attempt to stop you all the way, either by tripping you up or hitting you. The ball can be kind of sneaky too -- you've got to make sure you're actually trying to grab it, otherwise it'll just knock you down. It's a pretty barebones game with only this one mode available, but not bad at all for what it is.
The second game is a more complicated effort - Killerball, a rather obscure 1991 release for the Amiga by Microids. Killerball goes even further -- you have to complete a lap of the circuit before you can score, it takes a lot of the artwork and so on close to directly from the film, and there's a lot more moves at your disposal! You can punch people, hit them with a side kick, even pick them up and flat-out crush them with a wrestling-style back suplex -- which is pretty nasty. There's a couple of different modes too -- an easier mode where there's no injuries, as well as the "Elite" mode where chances are, either your team or the opponents' will be almost totally incapacitated by the end of the first half.
Both of these games are missing Rollerball's bikemen sadly, but they're both perfectly fine takes on the movie's classic game, as opposed to the more frequent future sports style of game which usually ended up being closer to something like football, handball or hockey -- they're both surprisingly good, and it's nice to see a couple of future sports games that actually do go directly to the genre's main source of inspiration. In a future video, I intend to look further at just how influential Rollerball has been on the world of video games -- but until then, this serves as a neat little taster for what's to come.
