Rocket: Robot on Wheels

About Rocket: Robot on Wheels

Rocket: Robot on Wheels (1999) is Sucker Punch's debut, a Nintendo 64 platformer in which a maintenance robot saves a theme park using puzzles built on realistic physics.

Rocket: Robot on Wheels in Depth

Rocket is a maintenance robot built by Dr. Gavin, architect and owner of the Whoopie World theme park. On the night before opening day, Gavin leaves him in charge of the park and its two mascots, Whoopie the walrus and his envious raccoon sidekick Jojo. Jojo escapes his cage, clobbers Rocket with a mallet, steals the park's tickets and tokens, kidnaps Whoopie and sabotages the attractions so the park can be rebranded Jojo World. Rocket must recover the tickets and tokens, catch Jojo and rescue Whoopie before Gavin returns; finding every one sees the park renamed RocketLand, to Whoopie's dismay.

It was the first home console game whose play was driven by a realistic physics engine, with puzzles involving mass, inertia, friction and other physical properties. A hub world leads to six themed worlds, each with 12 tickets and 200 tokens. Tickets come from objectives such as helping characters, winning minigames, collecting every token or finding seven machine parts to reactivate a machine and open new areas, and enough tickets unlock new worlds. Tokens buy new abilities, and booster packs raise Rocket's maximum health. Every world has at least one vehicle for solving puzzles, such as the first world's hot-dog-shaped car. NextGen called it "an attractive, almost anti-violent 3D puzzler" with puzzles more suited to adults.

Making Rocket: Robot on Wheels

After leaving Microsoft to found Sucker Punch, the team built a prototype on a PC without development kits, pitched it to Nintendo, received kits but no publishing deal, and spent about a year of their own money building the first level. Sony was impressed but declined because the concept was not mascot-centric and would launch on the N64, and a deal with Electronic Arts would have meant cancelling it to start a PlayStation 2 game; the team kept pitching until Ubisoft published it in 1999. It received favourable reviews: GamePro said it "works so well precisely because it is so different from the typical platform game", though another GamePro reviewer found its interface tedious.