As the studio turns 15, we head to London to find out.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how to defineRoll7because actually, it’s quite hard to do.
You could call it theOlliOllistudio but would that really be correct, because what aboutRollerdrome?
What about Not a Hero?
You’d miss half of what the studio has done.
Maybe it’s that Roll7 is an inventor; I like that.
Because think about it: who knew 2D skateboarding could be a thing beforeOlliOlli came along?
Hold the down button and release it to perform an ollie - it’s the foundation of the game.
And who could have predicted Laser League?
It had nothing at all to do with OlliOlli, so where did it come from?
But play it and any trepidation about the idea vanished.Laser League was immediate fun.
It’s just a shameit doesn’t seem to be playable anywhereany more.
Then there’s Rollerdrome - and I don’t think I’ve ever played a game like Rollerdrome.
A game that marries roller skating and shooting.
The concept is so wild it almost makes you laugh.
Roll7 is an inventor, then, but there’s something else linking the games too.
You know a Roll7 game by the feel of it.
Actually I tell a lie, it couldn’t be anything.
I know a couple of things.
I know that the next game will be fully 3D, for instance.
I also know the next game probably won’t be skateboarding.
“There’s not a lot of competition for 2D, side-scrolling skateboarding games,” he says.
“But in the fully 3D skateboarding space there are plenty of established IPs that are already there.
At the moment, a lot of the stuff we’re exploring is not necessarily more OlliOlli.”
We’re on the cusp of a whole new Roll7 era.
Ribbins, though, isn’t the only person I’m here to see.
Yiannikaris is leading one new game, and Ribbins is leading the other.
But maybe you guys could collaborate.
Would you like an introduction?"
Yiannikaris joined the project several months later, after a chunk of work had been done.
And the game wasn’t quite gelling.
Fortunately, it just so happened that Rabbitte was playing around with an arena prototype at the same time.
Yiannikaris saw it and loved it, and the direction changed from there.
But there was still a lot to do.
But it only worked on some enemies and not all the time, so it was binned.
How much shooting should there be versus how much skating?
“It’s a weird new thing,” Yiannikaris says.
Who was it for?
Would shooter fans like it or would skater fans like it?
Or would no one like it and it would collapse in a miserable heap?
“It always worried us,” he says.
It’s easy to say he shouldn’t have worried now of course, because critics would love it.
Inour own Rollerdrome review, Chris Tapsell wrote: “Roll7 blends genres with total mastery in Rollerdrome.
One of the most breathlessly stylish and casually, outrageously cool games you’ll ever play.”
But Yiannikaris couldn’t have known it would get that response back then.
“I actually said to my girlfriend before I left the house, ‘Should I write something?'”
“And she said, ‘No.
Because you know what?
So he freestyled it.
Well, it turns out that Yiannikaris had been at Roll7 before.
Why, though, did Yiannikaris not stay?
Well, it wasn’t unusual for people to leave at the time.
Except there was, a bit.
And then repeat that.
And doing that five or six days a week.
And I was like, ‘Whoa!
I’ve done everything I need to do today.
I’m going to finish early tonight.’
“At eleven pm.”
It was why when the offer of working on Rollerdrome came around, Yiannikaris needed convincing to go back.
In the years since he’d been at Roll7, though, some very important things had changed.
“Nobody’s going to crunch.
We’re not going to do it,” says Ribbins.
But they were only partially successful in their aim.
They apparently kept crunch away from employees, for the most part, but not from themselves.
Conversations began towards the end of OlliOlli World’s development, a game that Private Division would publish.
Ribbins had an epiphany one evening during a games award ceremony.
Roll7 didn’t want to keep doing that.
So the idea of having the funding to support that was attractive.
To that end, Roll7 is now 60 people, and will probably grow more.
Doing that on an independent budget would be scary.
So Roll7 signed the deal.
Yiannikaris’ game was pitched to him by Ribbins, after another prototype didn’t work out.
“And I was just like, ‘Fuck yeah, I’ll take that.’
And really, I’ve been running with that very high level pitch ever since.”
What either game actually is though, in terms of genre and gameplay, I don’t know.
With any luck, he tells me, it will be revealed this year.
That’s where I leave Roll7: teetering on the edge of a new era.
To my eyes, Roll7 seemed like it always has seemed.
No, in fact, maybe it seemed better.
Stronger, more stable, more sure.
I can’t wait to see what the inventor Roll7 will dream up next.
