"Chasing safe bets is a death sentence": Rematch devs had no desire to simply chase FIFA or Rocket League, but they spent years planning out their hit football game

Smash-hit football game Rematch was an unlikely follow-up to its developers' previous game, but the team knew it wanted to make it years ago.

Speaking to Edge, creative director Pierre Tarno said that "the decision to do Rematch happened way before Sifu was released." Sifu, for those not familiar with developer Sloclap's back catalogue, is a kung-fu action game with a unique aging system. It was a commercial success, racking up one million sales in its first month, but it was also an obvious follow-up to its predecessor, Absolver, which was a slightly more open-ended kung-fu game.

In spite of its different subject matter, however, the team knew Rematch would be its next game after Sifu a long time ago. "It was not a question of 'oh, Sifu did very well – what are we doing next," Tarno says. In fact, he explains that a small team was actually working on prototyping Rematch almost a year before Sifu's release.

The game's history stretches back even further than that, however. Tarno first pitched Rematch after completing Absolver in 2021. At the time, Sloclap was too small to handle two projects at the same time, so the project that would become Rematch was pushed back.

Even if Rematch maintains a lot of the physicality that shaped Sloclap's previous games, it's still a dramatic shift in genre. For Tarno, however, that's as it should be – "chasing the safe bets is a death sentence," he says. "I think gamers are on the lookout for new, original experiences."

Referencing genre juggernauts like FIFA and Rocket League, he points out that "these games are different giants in all these fields, and they do what they do super well. And so I think we just want to do something different."

Elsewhere, Tarno explains the differences he sees between Rematch and FIFA, suggesting that his competitor is "disconnected" from how it actually feels to play football. Attempting to offer something new, he points out that his game is a little more of a "football player simulator" than FIFA's tactics-driven approach, further outlining his desire to steer clear of something that had come before.

Forget FIFA, Rematch is the most authentic football game I've ever played – right down to the very worst bits about playing IRL.