Next from the Makers of Grand Theft Auto: Pong!

If it were April I'd consider this news a bit of tomfoolery, but it seems to be legit: Rockstar San Diego announced that its first next-generation title for the XBox 360 will be...Table Tennis? "Our goal was to create a game that is perfectly addictive in its focused simplicity," explains Rockstar founder Sam Houser. "It is a distillation of game design philosophy, focusing on removing the traditional areas of compromise inherent in managing size and scope and concentrating the hardware's entire power on one activity, with the aim of doing that better than it's ever been done before." Compare this to the company's Grand Theft Auto titles, which are a kind of meta-game, a game that contains all other games, almost infinite in scope but relatively shallow in depth. I sense the company is working towards a grand plan. Non-GTA Rockstart games, like Midnight Club and State of Emergency tend to have that "this is actually practice for something we're going to put in GTA" feel. Have their attempts at refining game engines led them to revisit the very genesis of action gaming, the old paddle-n-ball?

If they could capture the speed and immediacy of real table tennis, it would be quite interesting. That said, can anyone see this working with a regular Xbox joystick? Read the press release.