Keväällä 2006 Rockstar Games yllätti maailman julkaisemalla urheilupelin Table Tennis. Moista ei osannut odottaa kukaan. Rockstarin perustajiin kuuluva Sam Houser paljasti, että haluna oli tehdä jotain aivan uutta, ja toisaalta osoittaa uusimman konsolipolven tehot.
"We absolutely love table tennis and wanted to try and make something that could show the audience what could be possible in the next generation of videogames."
Rockstarin toisen perustajan Jamie Kingin mukaan kyse olisi kuitenkin ollut uuden RAGE-pelimoottorin tehojen osoittamisesta. Myöhemmin RAGE oli pohjana peleille Grand Theft Auto IV, Grand Theft Auto V, Red Dead Redemption ja Red Dead Redemption 2. RAGE taas oli vastaveto Electronic Artsin ostolle Criterionista ja Renderwaresta. Tällä pohjalla nimittäin tehtiin Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto Vice City ja Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. Asiasta kertoi Time Extension.
"I was in Rockstar Vienna working on the ports for Max Payne for consoles and I got off the plane and Sam's like, 'Fucking EA's just bought Renderware, we need to make our own engine, sort it out!" So I'm like 'Cool, okay!' And so, one of the reasons that we loved Rockstar San Diego was they had an amazing exporter and we loved Midtown Madness. So, we brought people from Rockstar Vienna and Rockstar North to San Diego and we created RAGE. So I helped build that initial team and the beginnings of the next-gen engine that Rockstar still use today. And then we got to go to Japan and play with the PlayStation 3 before anyone else when it was just a big silver box with a red button."
Table Tenniksen ideana oli ennen kaikkea testata uusien konsolien fysiikkamallinnusta.
"Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis was really a game for us to show off or prove our game engine from a physics perspective. It was a nice and small and realistic thing to make in time, right? Because the PlayStation 3 was that whole cell-processor architecture where if you were an Xbox developer and you hadn't sat down with Sony and seen the bus and the SPUs and whatever, you had to be so disciplined about how you broke down your code and sent the instructions off to come back and recompile. On an Xbox, you had three PowerPC chips and they could all see each other, you could be very sloppy with your code."
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