UPDATE: 2025-06-24 09:52 EST BY JAMES TROUGHTON
The Record Has Been Broken
Rejoice, ye five Ricochet fans! The record was indeed broken last night, as the game hit 353 players, its highest peak in six years.
Summary
Valve is behind some of gaming’s greatest, genre-defining hits, likeHalf-Life,Portal… and Ricochet.
Ricochet 2 confirmed?????
If you haven’t heard of it, I don’t blame you. Just imaginethe infamous Xen levels, but in an arena shooter where you leap across the void and fire discs at each other. Released in 2000, it’s easy to see why people were so disappointed. Valve followed up Half-Life with a middling platformer where you only had one weapon — thank god forCounter-StrikeandTeam Fortress.
I’d say that it at least became a cult classic in the over two decades since its release, but it only ever reached a concurrent player peak of 95, hardly ideal for a multiplayer game. And when I tried to interview the dregs of its near-non-existent playerbase for an undeserved retrospective, I couldn’t find any active players, just a couple of lone wolves idling in the few servers left. But that’s about to change.
#RicochetingTheBar: Breaking 95 Players After Six Years
For April Fool’s Day, the Valve community is honoring this “forgotten” game with a dedicated event, #RicochetingTheBar. At 8pm BST/3pm EDT, fans will flock back en masse to Ricochet to boost its peak player count. This momentous occasion is being led by none other than Lambda Generation,the fan-led Valve social network site, which has also launcheda dedicated landing pagefor players to share all their favourite Ricochet memes, fan art, and even lore.
I looked atthe wiki, because what lore? But apparently, fans think that it takes place millions of years in the future of Half-Life.
Ricochet’s measly 95 peak player count has been held firm for nearly six years, and it shouldn’t be all that hard to beat. Though I don’t want to jinx it. My experience with Ricochet, going back all these years later, is that it’s unbelievably broken. Valve hasn’t exactly given it the same love and attention as its flagship titles. Several user reviews paint a similar picture, running into constant crashes and game freezes, so it remains to be seen just how active it evencanget.
However, other user reviews, even the negative ones, do praise Ricochet for its inventive multiplayer, calling it a bold, unique, if wonky arena shooter. Rather than killing your opponent by whittling away their health, you have to knock them off the map, which is a novel concept, especially for a ’00s game at the height of the arena shooter genre. But I’ll leave it up to you whether it was a well-executed, novel idea. They certainly didn’t think so in the ’00s, whenpeople like MrWhoopy wrote that it’s “the worst Valve game yet”.
Still, tonight will probably be your last chance in a long while to try it out, since it might be the only time the servers actually fill up with enough people to play.
