Brutal Deluxe is back: Rebellion’s Speedball reboot slams onto PC, Xbox, and PS5 Feature By Nate Drake 🪩 @Rebellion #GameDev #IndieGame

If you grew up in the late 80s/early 90s there was one place to go if you wanted you and your friends to scream at each other over a metal ball in a bare steel cyberpunk arena: Speedball (1988) and its successor Speedball II:Brutal Deluxe were future sports games where no-holds-barred violence mattered just as much as scoring goals.

Rebellion’s latest reboot of the franchise leans fully into this brutality and comes out the other side with a 3D epic. Speedball’s Lead Designer Jim Stimpson and Art Director Sam Beattie were good enough to agree to speak to me about their dystopian creation.

This was an interview I'd been itching to do since Rebellion's acquisition of the Bitmap Brothers catalogue in 2019, which includes likes of Xenon, The Chaos, Engine as well as the Speedball series, though there was never much doubt about which the company would focus on first:

“It was more a group decision," Sam explained. "What games people here loved, and what we thought the market would be excited by. Speedball just naturally presented itself as the frontrunner, because tons of people in the studio were super excited about the idea of bringing it back.”