Opposable Thumbs / Gaming & Entertainment

Masterpiece: Rocket Jockey for the PC—you heard me

Rocket Jockey married rockets, surf punk music, and greaser style to create a …

"It's your basic boy-meets-rocket, boy-loses-rocket, boy-gets-dragged-along-the-ground-and-crushed-against-wall-story."

The above quote is from the box of Rocket Jockey, a PC game that was released in 1996 and had many strikes against it. The system requirements were steep for the time, so you had to have a relatively high-end system to run it well. It shipped without multiplayer of any kind, although there was a patch that added LAN play released months after the game's launch. The game didn't look immediately impressive in screenshots, and it was hard to explain.

On the other hand, the game had style, and the few of us who stuck with it and played for any amount of time fell in love. Rocket Jockey has a loyal following, although it's not as well known as other games on our Masterpiece list. For the soundtrack, the action, and the sheer balls of the thing, we think it deserves to finally get some recognition.

Rocket Science Games was dealing with the failure of its full-motion video releases—does anyone remember Loadstar: the Legend of Tully Bodine?—and decided to create something that would get rid of video and work like an actual game. Rocket Jockey was set in an alternate-reality 1930s America and the game oozed with the setting, from the advertisements to the music and art design. Even the box looked like a giant middle finger on the shelves, next to the simulations and me-too PC releases of the time.

The premise was built around a sport where the crazy rode on rocket engines, called "sleds," and attempted to either race or destroy each other. Since the engines were so powerful, you could only turn in a limited fashion, and each field was littered with pylons. You had a sort of tow-cable on either side of your engine that could attach to these pylons, allowing you to make tighter turns or quick 180 degree turns. It gets better: you could also use these cables to clothesline the other players, or rip them off their rockets and drag them behind you. Even with the primitive graphics, the action looked brutally violent.

Rocket Jockey Commercial

LAN play was a heavily advertised feature, but it took the company months after release to finally enable it. The good news is that when it worked—and that was never a given—it was beautiful. You could yank someone off their rocket, or if someone was knocked off by another player you could grab their sled and keep it away from them. You could grab a player with your cable and drag them behind you before using your other cable to lash them directly to a pylon. Another tactic was grabbing a pylon from a long distance, using it to turn in circles, and clotheslining any player that was stupid enough to get close. Or why not lash a player to a mine on the field and blow them up? You didn't just hurt you opponents, you humiliated them. This was a game made for talking trash, and the surfer-punk soundtrack—with guitar performed by the legendary Dick Dale—added to the sense of nastiness and spite.

You felt mean when you played Rocket Jockey, as if the game gave you pomade-slicked hair and a switchblade. You didn't unlock the other engines by winning matches; that would be too simple. You had to knock off the other player, grab the sled, and finish the event with it in working order.

The game featured a race mode, standard death match, and "rocket ball," where you had to grab a ball and work it through a set of goals to score. With the limited steering ability and other players working against you, scoring was not an easy task.

Rocket Jockey Soundtrack

This is going to be a controversial choice for Masterpiece designation, but if you don't like it, there's the door. This was an amazing game, despite the delayed and tricky multiplayer implementation and higher-than-average system requirements. It's also a rarity in our list: a game that hasn't been revamped, rechewed, and regurgitated through a series of soulless remakes or updates. It hit the market, made an impression on a very small audience that was willing to work through its flaws, and slid away, never to be seen again. Copies of the game are hard to find and don't play well with modern systems.

If anyone is willing to put in the work and can figure out who owns the rights, this would be an amazing PlayStation Network, Xbox Live Arcade, or PC release with updated graphics. There is nothing technically demanding going on here, but the mechanics were rock-solid. My only suggestion? Keep the music.

Rocket Jockey, you were great. Now it's your time to shine, even if it's only on our pages.

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