The Rocky movie franchise has an odd legacy. The first movie was a serious drama, winning three Oscars including Best Picture. But as star and writer Sylvester Stallone's stock rose, it became more of a fist-pumping action fest, jumping the shark with Rocky 5, then re-establishing itself as a more dramatic series with Rocky Balboa, the sixth film in the series. This led to Creed, where the son of Rocky's opponent in the first two flicks trains with Rocky himself.
Boxing games have a similar up-and-down legacy. Eugene Elkin, senior software engineer at Survios, explains how upcoming arcade fighter Big Rumble Boxing: Creed Champions fits into the genre. "The [recent] boxing games that we've seen have been Fight Night, which is an amazing game, but it's very much a simulator," Elkin says. "And then there's the fighting game genre, which doesn't have that much overlap with boxing. We're putting ourselves right in the middle. Our inspiration is the Ready to Rumble series. Great games like that will never really go out of style, right? People can still pick up Ready to Rumble and have a lot of fun. It's an old system, it's outdated graphics, but it's great. Another was Smash Bros. – just because it's a brawler, it's easy to pick up. There's just a couple of buttons, anybody can play. [Boxing games] can be checkers or chess. The board is the same, but the game is different."
Related: Report: Why So Many Sports Titles Are Embracing The Women's GameBig Rumble Boxing is something of a sequel to Creed: Rise to Glory. Both made by Survios with Elkin in a lead role, Creed was a VR title, and while that meant Big Rumble Boxing essentially had to be rebuilt from the ground up, it also meant the team knew their way around the Rocky property extremely well. "I feel like a lot of IP games tend to fall into a mediocre range," Elkin says. "In my opinion, a lot of times the keyholder puts a lot of restrictions on what the game should be, can be, is supposed to look like. MGM, which has been a great partner on our first go round, they're like, 'Whatever you guys want to do'. They will play, they'll give us their feedback, but they're like, 'You guys make the story'. The first experience was so good, and the way it really came about is when we released the VR Rise to Glory game. There were a lot of comments on our YouTube trailer asking if we have a non-VR version as well, like 'Can I play it on the Switch?' and the answer was, 'It's a VR game, but we'll think about it'. So we thought about it, and we came up with what we think is a great game built from the ground up for more traditional consoles. This is going a more traditional route with the controller, the old-school, arcade-style experience."
But how exactly do you make a non-VR sequel to a VR game? As Elkin explains, it's by not really treating it as a sequel at all. "When we first set out to make this game, we knew it was going to be from the ground up," Elkin says. "But we've had a lot of experience doing it in first-person, because we've done it so many times. Actually, our first go at it in our prototype was, 'Let's make it first-person, still controlled by a keyboard or mouse or gamepad'. Just because we have so much experience, maybe we can recreate a lot of the same mechanics. We realised right away – let's not try to recreate what we've done before. So we went the more traditional route. And a lot of the restrictions that we have to fight in VR are gone. So we all of a sudden have so much freedom because in VR, you are the controller, I don't know what the user is doing. The user can be doing this [Elkin slaps wildly]. You're not acting like a boxer. I can act like a boxer, you know, block your face. Here we could really make it look and feel the way we want it to."
That doesn't mean it's all 100 percent realistic, though. Since the game takes inspiration from Ready to Rumble, it has a few tricks up its sleeve. "If I want to knock a guy 20 feet in the air, or if I want to do the animation where the knuckles are scraping in the ground and catching fire, I can," Elkin says. "This isn't just pure boxing, it's a very arcade-y boxing experience. We want to bring back the old school feel of just 'mash buttons, have fun'. It's if you want to get your feet wet in a fighting game, or boxing game experience. I think it gave us a lot more freedom."
This is where the Smash Bros. inspiration comes back in. Big Rumble Boxing wants to capture the plug-and-play vibe of Nintendo's brawler, with Elkin explaining that this approachability was a core building block of the game.
"There's multiple pillars that when you first start a game, and one of the biggest pillars that's holding it up is, 'It needs to be accessible to everyone'," Elkin says. "With Smash Bros., it's just a couple of buttons. You hold the direction button in and you don't need to do quarter arcs and then complicated patterns of A, B, A, B, right? It just kind of works, and this is really what we went with. Because we wanted you to pop up the controller and give it to anyone you know, your little brother, your colleague, anywhere you are – in a car, in a plane. There's just a couple of buttons and you just start mashing 'em. And if you want to be a button masher, you can still have a good time. Or if you want, you can take your time and learn the movies and learn the characters and the power moves, the ultimates and when to use them. But absolutely, the reason we were inspired by Smash Bros. is the accessibility it needed to be instantly fun."
Big Rumble Boxing launches later this year on Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC.
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