Rolling Blitz

The logo of the game.

***Rolling Blitz*** is a battle royale racing video game developed by Round 1 Industries and published by Imaginate.

The game is a racing battle game to which players have to race against each other inside Rolling Spheres (made by The Black-Suited Stars) to win. However, they can harm their opponents with special abilities when charged up, making the race go chaotic and hilarious. Rolling Blitz was praised by many critics for its funny and climatic racing, the humor, the characters and the music.

The game was released on January 2nd, 2021.

## Gameplay

The game let players pick a skin, what plastic bubble they chose and go on a series of race tracks to see who is the winner with over 20 players to compete against in this Wipeout-like bonanza.

## Development

Development began in August 2019. *Heroes* and *Invincible Bullet* creator Cappy was originally going to have the game a puzzle game titled "Junk Jocker", where the player has to get inside zorb balls to collect garbage and sell the trash to a pacific business to send them to a island known for having too much junk. However, Cappy find this idea lackluster, but upon this idea, he decided to make this new game a battle royale racing game. Cappy wanted this new racing game to be "weird", "abnormal" and "silly". This new game draws inspiration to one of Cappy's favorites when he was young. Those being *Super Monkey Ball* and, Cappy's most favorite, *Katamari Damacy*.

Cappy and the Round 1 team has to come up with ideas to make the game look 'fun' and 'hilarious'. They made the main character of the game Snow Girl, which is a good start but they need to make some kind of group of people that are responsible for making the zorb balls. The zorb balls were changed to Rolling Spheres, to which they are completely different than the real ones, containing special abilities such as sticking another's Rolling Sphere's into the original player's, much like both *Katamari* and *Monkey Ball*. The group of people of the game would be called "The All-iens", but it sounded too boring and almost felt like Katamari, so the team of Round 1 changed the group into something basic and usual on Earth called "The Black-Suited Stars", who are responsible for making the chaotic zorb balls of Rolling Spheres. Interestingly, the team of Round 1 manages to get p\*\*n artist, Shadman, into the character design of the game, as long as he doesn't make any characters look 'inappropriate'.

Imaginate wanted the game to be a online game so that players won't have to play by themselves in order to be fun.

## Reception

Rolling Blitz was praised for its chaotic racing gameplay, the character/art design, the racetracks and the music. IGN gave the game a 8/10 calling the game a "hilarious party game that draws attention to people who remember playing both either *Monkey Ball* and *Katamari*". GameSpot gave it a 7/10. EGM gave it a 9/10. GalacticGamer gave the game 9/10 ☆s and praised everything that were featured in the game but criticize microtransactions for newly skins. Luckily though, Imaginate manages to put in-game coins in the race tracks in order to collect new skins for a "fair change of pace".

## Trivia

* *Rolling Blitz* was inspired by SEGA's *Super Monkey Ball* and Bandai Namco's *Katamari Damacy*.