These were also the only two original titles for PS2 launch. 'If you remember Midnight Club was the first (and still is the only true) open city racing game that allows you to go anywhere you want in an entire city, and Smugglers Run was a huge open environment that stretched with incredible draw distances as far as the eye could see and allowed you to go absolutely anywhere. ' an obsession with detail and with creating a more immediate, more physical, more emotional experience,' explained Houser at the time. 'Rockstar San Diego is known for being able to create engines to push hardware further than anyone else, particularly at the beginning of its lifecycle. Table Tennis was developed by Rockstar San Diego, the studio well known for pushing a new engine to its limits - and the team behind GTA 4.
It was the game that allowed Rockstar to finely tune the nuances of its new gaming engine, which went on to power games like GTA 4, Red Dead Redemption and GTA 5.
But the table tennis simulator was so good that Rockstar decided to release it as a fully fledged game. Rockstar Presents Table Tennis started life as a simple tech demo for the new Rockstar Advanced Game Engine (RAGE) that was made prior to the launch of the Xbox 360 and PS3.
