Hit the Courts in ‘Racket Club,’ an All-New Sport Built For VR

Racket sports are on the rise, and Racket Club is here to bring all the fun and addictiveness of those sports to VR. It’s a game that anyone can enjoy, even if you’ve never picked up a tennis racket before or have no clue what a pickleball is. Racket Club is a brand-new sport with its own set of unique rules, and both veteran players and newbies will find something to like here. You can hit the courts today by picking the game up on Meta Quest for $24.99 USD.

In Racket Club, you play on a small court (make sure your playspace is at least 6.5 ft x 6.5 ft) enclosed with glass walls, and it doesn’t require locomotion of any kind. You just have to turn and move your body to follow the ball as it bounces off the ground or walls and return it to your opponent. One major difference from real-life sports is that the point value actually increases the longer you and your opponent keep the ball in play, which means there’s always an opportunity to make a dramatic comeback.

You can rise up the ranks in the single-player career mode by playing against AI rivals, improve your techniques with different drills, or play against others online in either singles or doubles matches. Make sure to also visit the multiplayer Club space—set in a pristine sports facility with multiple open courts, you can walk around and socialize with other players, challenge them to a game, or just chill and spectate live matches. You can even use the Club to host your own informal tournaments, just as Resolution Games has done several times throughout Racket Club’s development.

We sat down with Resolution Chief Creative Officer Mathieu Castelli for a fun chat about the real-life sports that inspired Racket Club, the complexity of emulating the physics involved in these sports, and how they trained the AI bots on their own team members.

Mathieu Castelli: I’m an avid racket player and play tennis regularly. The idea of developing a racket game in VR actually came up when we were developing our PvP dueling game, Blaston, where you play in roughly a 6.5 foot square. You might think that’s too small a space to play something like a racket sport, but in developing Blaston, we saw just how much you could do physically with your body in that amount of space. Then you take the walls from squash, racketball, and padel to make sure the ball can’t escape to the sides, so there’s no advantage to having a bigger space… et voilà!

On top of that, you essentially double your playspace when you play doubles in Racket Club (which, just like for pickleball, we see doubles as the core mode) because now two players in both of their homes combine their available space to make a bigger court, and it actually feels like you have quite a lot of room within that space.

MC: Definitely, the craze of pickleball in the U.S. and padel in Europe was a key part of the internal pitch that led to the decision to make this game. But it goes beyond the core sport—it’s also seeing the social vibe around pickleball courts that led us to embark on mixing the gameplay with the social space in the Club to promote pickup games.

MC: It directly stems from our decision to have real movements only, and no locomotion. That set a pretty high constraint on the court size. Once you make that decision, it’s no longer about pure simulation and you’re free to approach it like you would a video game—make it so that it’s easy to pick up, hard to master, and conducive to a variety of play styles.

From that point, we picked familiar pieces from various racket sports—swings and racket strings from tennis to capture the feel of the classic “full body” top and back spins, as well as smashes; a kitchen-like zone close to the net like pickleball that lets us extend the court size without requiring more user space; the padel rule on the back wall to limit mindless ball slapping; extreme spins as in table tennis; and pickleball-like ball drag, to name a few. However, even if the sport within Racket Club doesn’t exist in real life, the physics are rooted in something that feels familiar to all of the racket players that have played it so far.

Also, by creating our own sport, we could do something about scoring! We have this special rule in the game called Ultra Rally that’s very specific to Racket Club because you can only do this in a digital game. The rule is simple: The value of the point you’re playing increases by the number of shots; the longer the rally is, the more points it’s worth. This came from watching hours of tennis, and seeing that sometimes after a long rally a point feels incredible—but it’s always worth the same one point. Now, in Racket Club the longer the point is going on, the more you know it impacts the score of the match and the stakes are rising, which creates score-turnaround moments. It’s capped at five points, and increases every four hits.

You’re playing to 11 and if you’re down 10 to five, you could feasibly—very rarely, but it’s possible and when it happens it’s incredible—turn it around with one point!

MC: I’d probably say the physics of the game. It’s the core of the game really, and the team has said that I became obsessed with it. Maybe I did read a couple hundred academic articles on the topic… but we wanted to get the look and feel of the game right. And I think we did! When you’re trying to emulate the feeling of something that is the result of trillions of molecules interacting in four or five milliseconds—when you look at the slow motion of how a ball compresses on the racket and then leaves the racket—it’s so complex! So there was a lot of work, and of course you can’t simulate that complexity. You have to find the right level of abstraction, so that was the first concurring moment.

And it took so many iterations, reading math papers, studying other people’s previous work on “what is tennis” and “what is the game of pickleball” and how can you mathematically model it so that you can program it. Once we had the right feeling of impact, that was a big step for the project to make it viable.

The bots were also a fun challenge, because we wanted to create the most human-like components possible for this mode. We trained them with a very unique technology that’s a first for VR, which is machine learning and artificial intelligence. In our case, we trained them on our own team members playing the game for a while, and we’ve seen them mimicking our movements, improving their skills, and becoming even better than us sometimes!

MC: Mixed reality is used to play in MR, as well as for those that play in full VR to assist in placing their court. When you play in MR, your half of the court is rendered in Passthrough, and the other half is in a virtual portal. You can adjust where the portal starts or how big it is.

For placing your court, it’s really simple: We show you your current placement, and you can move the court around until you’re satisfied and then recenter it.

MC: There are several benefits to having MR in Racket Club. First, it’s for players with tight spaces: some players get scared quickly of hitting the ball hard when there’s furniture just at the edge of your court. With MR, you tend to play much more freely in tighter places than you could in full VR. In that sense, it’s absolutely essential for Racket Club.

If you have small kids or pets, MR can also help you stay aware of them at all times, which is important because you generate very fast motions in the game. While I normally play in VR once the kids are in bed, I play in MR during the day because of that.

Third, it makes court placement easy and intuitive: It’s now a ritual for me to hit the Court Placement shortcut before every match to make sure my court is centered in the right place.

Overall, I think that a major aspect of MR is the fact that it actually helps people get more comfortable about the idea of VR. While there are some times when you want to be fully immersed in the club experience, walk around, spectate other games, etc., there will also be times—maybe when you’re just getting used to the game or have other things going on that may prevent your full attention—when MR will be very helpful. For example, being able to see your surroundings when you’re first getting into the game can be very comforting to people who may not understand how to properly draw a boundary or aren’t fully confident in it. With Racket Club in particular, this is one thing we’ve seen that’s been very helpful for new players.

MC: Absolutely, yes! I think VR in general is really changing the way that people approach real-life sports. With Racket Club, I think it can help total beginners build up their hand-eye-racket coordination much faster because you don’t lose time chasing balls that’re rolling away. Gaining self-confidence and knowing that you can hit the ball before you go to an actual racket club will help as well. I’ve seen myself and other members of the team and in the community become better real-life racket sport players from spending so much time within Racket Club.

MC: The Club with five courts around makes tournament organizing so much easier: Everyone gathers in the club and gets dispatched to play their matches next to one another.

We’ve had weekly internal tournaments all along until the beta started in September. And beta players just ran the last beta tournament this past weekend—the pair that won are actually old friends and top players from Eleven Table Tennis, which shows the commonality of core skills we discussed earlier. And the beauty of VR sports is that one player was from Germany and the other was in Australia.

MC: Whether you play tennis, pickleball, squash, or padel, I guarantee that the game will give you real racket sport sensations. And if you’ve never dared open the doors of a real racket club, Racket Club is a great way to begin that wonderful journey.

Grab some friends (or meet some new ones online) and start your Racket Club career today.