Creators & Studios

Rocket Racing’s creator ecosystem was seeded deliberatly. Epic opened UEFN Rocket Racing creation on March 20, 2024 (toolset and device inventory: Section 6) source and began surfacing creator tracks inside the mode with the April 9, 2024 Neon Rush update source. After v31.40 (October 12, 2024) ended themed first party updates (“New tracks from creators are releasing every day” source), creators effectively were the content pipeline until the October 2026 shutdown, when all official and user made Rocket Racing islands are slated for deletion source, with car physics, hazards, Track Spline and Speed Boost devices folded into base UEFN in April 2026 as a migration path source.

9.1 Professional studios and commissioned work

The Rocket Racing Game Jam (2024). Epic staffer Flak announced (June 11, 2024) that pro Rocket League player and map maker Lethamyr, plus UEFN studios Alliance Studios (@fn_alliance), 404 Creative (@404fnc) and 3D Lab (@3DLabFN), built Rocket Racing tracks in a compressed ~2-day, invite only game jam held at Psyonix Studios in San Diego using the new tools; forum user WPG-Hero criticized the post as an advertisement source. Several jam/commission tracks were published as quasi official “Psyonix maps” (the speedrun.com Community Tracks board files them under a “Psyonix Maps” category source). An official jam video exists on YouTube source.

Karta’s NASCAR work spawned the mode’s biggest branded event: streamer Chica hosted Ally & NASCAR’s $10,000 Talladega Rocket Racing tournament (Oct 2024, run through the Ally Discord, with 2025 Daytona tickets as prizes) source, documented on Liquipedia.

9.2 Individual UEFN track creators

Education infrastructure: Cleverlike Studios’ UEFN Creator School offers a free “My First Rocket Racing Track” course (instructor Ian Southwell) source, and community tutorials exist such as “Creating CUSTOM TRACKS for Rocket Racing in UEFN! Full Tutorial” source. Directories: Epic’s official RR category page, Fortnite.GG racing maps, FortniteMaps race section.

9.3 Content creators, community figures, and channels

• Official channels: X @RocketRacing and @RR_Status (patch notes/status); YouTube @rocketracing; developer run Discord “Rocket Racing: Race Without Limits” (~3,140 members listed, with a UEFN creator sharing channel; invite discord.gg/rocketracing) source (unverified).
• Kanga (@KangaRogue): YouTuber covering Rocket Racing updates and content.
• Chica (@ChicaLive): streamer host of the $10K Ally/NASCAR Talladega tournament (Oct 2024).
• Dylanos_ (Ireland): star runner of the speedrun.com Rocket Racing board (4,003 runs, 449 players; super mods AceDelusional, DarthZed, Havvak, skiizuo) source; subject of the profile video “Meet Dylanos, the Rocket Racer with a Need for Speed”.
• AceDelusional: curator of the Rocket Racing: Community Tracks board (65 community levels across “seasons” S0-S2, e.g. BOA Constrictor, Twisty Touge, Mars Abduction, Pumpkin Patch) and its map code spreadsheet; shared community Discord discord.gg/9dUjMuKDRG.
• RRD: community tournament org behind the RRD Rocket Racing Open 2024 source and the Winter Cup 2025 source (dates, prize pool, and results coverage in Section 11). Fan servers include Rocket Racing League on Discord source.
• Video essayists (postmortem): “Why Rocket Racing Failed... And How Epic Can Save It” and “Rocket Racing: What Went Wrong?”; notable because no developer postmortem exists (see 9.4).

9.4 The anonymous developers: Psyonix’s unnamed team

For a mode from one of the industry’s most storied studios, Rocket Racing has almost no named authors in the public record. The GDC 2024 session “Building New Rocket Racing Experiences with UEFN” is credited only to “the team at Psyonix”: no individual speakers are named on Epic’s developer portal source, on the forum announcement posted by Epic_ELT (April 22, 2024) source, or on the Unreal GDC 2024 event page; the speakers’ identities remain a genuine documentary gap (YouTube uploads: 1, 2). Game Informer’s launch week New Gameplay Today featured only GI staff Alex Van Aken and Jesse Vitelli, no Psyonix guests source, and Wikipedia’s Rocket Racing article names no Psyonix individuals at all; its reception section is press critics only source.

Named individuals the record does contain:

• Saxs Persson (Epic EVP, Fortnite ecosystem) is the only executive voice attached to the mode: “Rocket Racing is adding credible racing mechanics to our creators and track design editors… In order for us to make really good tools, we have to use them ourselves” (Jan 2, 2024), framing first party modes as UEFN dogfooding source. His June 2025 interviews (Creative Bloq, Digiday with Tim Sweeney) omit Rocket Racing entirely.
• Devin Connors (Psyonix senior community manager), at launch: “we just didn’t have the capacity to do our normal video about rewards this season”; ex esports employee “Juliventure” added that marketing/PR/community had been cut to 1-2 people with the “dev side spread thin across projects” source. Links: X, LinkedIn.
• Corey Davis (Psyonix co studio head / design chief) left Psyonix/Epic in May 2023, before Rocket Racing launched source, cofounding Off By One Games with fellow Rocket League veterans Jared Cone (physics engineer) and Travis Wright source. Founder/CEO Dave Hagewood remained at Psyonix source.
• Ethan Snell (Senior CG Supervisor, Cinematics) and Dan Schoenblum (principal engineer / director of online services): Psyonix staff associated with the mode’s era, findable only via LinkedIn/MobyGames rather than official credits (unverified).
• Layoff era names: the Sept 28, 2023 Epic cuts removed Psyonix staff including Ted Gabbard, Sofia Lillo, Jake Friedman, Chlo Jones, Allyson Szramek, and Kyle Sherwood source (unverified); after the March 2026 cuts, Epic spokesperson Cat McCormack insisted “Rocket League is still a priority” while PCGamesN found roughly half a dozen Psyonix staff among ~100 LinkedIn layoff posts source; PC Gamer named laid off Fortnite balance director Hunter ErkenBrack and Epic comms director Natalie Munoz source; ex principal engineer Evan Kinney vented on X source. A community “Awesome People List” collected 545 laid off Epic resumes source. After the March 2026 cuts the official Discord’s two Epic staff voices went quiet: community members reported Devin Connors laid off and gone from the server, and Capybro still at Epic but moved to Save the World, “Capy still works at epic”, “He’s over at stw” (RR #rocket-racing-chat, April 17, 2026); both fates are community attested, never Epic confirmed.

The concept artists. The one place real RR developer authorship is publicly visible is artists’ portfolios. Verified Rocket Racing development art in public portfolios: Alana Guidry (Skull Rock Isle, Sidewinder, Jackrabbit), Kirill Muravev (RR UI concept), Nikita Kibirev (RR key visuals), and Amin Montazeri (RR map art); none are labeled as unreleased/cancelled content. Separately, Jose “Emroca” Flores is a verified Senior Concept Artist at Epic Games in San Diego with a public Rocket League credit (ArtStation, artofemroca.com). He is the fullest first party window into the mode’s world that exists in public. Beyond the June 23 Instagram sky city post, his portfolio carries a dedicated Rocket Racing project of roughly thirty pieces: foundational world building that defined the mode’s visual identity across four themed districts (Resort, Lush, Casino, Under), the signature Cruzero resort vessel, the modular “plate” construction of the world, its shape language, and blue sky vehicle concepts (Trezlow, Ratcat, Pa20). All of it is preserved and credited with this archive. See Section 16 for the full set and the evidence chain.

No true developer postmortem of its failure exists publicly; the closest Epic came was the shutdown statement conceding that some of its modes were not compelling enough to attract and keep a large player base (full quote in Section 17) source. Its racing tools live on inside base UEFN as Epic pivots to “a more creator-driven future” source.

9.5 Faces of the scene

The individuals whose names recur across the guide, speedrun, creator, leak, and developer chapters, gathered in one place. Each profile points to the sections carrying the full detail. (The archive’s maintainer, community dataminer shrezee, also appears throughout (Section 8.3, Section 10.4, Section 16) but, as this document’s author, is deliberately not profiled here.)

• Havvak: speedrun.com super moderator on both the main Rocket Racing board and the Community Tracks board (see Section 10.3, Section 10.5), and compiler of the community maintained Rocket Racing Comprehensive Guide (17 credited contributors), the document most of this archive’s mechanics numbers derive from (see Section 5). Havvak also wrote the forum ruling that banned the Speed Glitch from standard leaderboard submissions and split it into its own dedicated category, one of the board’s defining moderation decisions (see Section 5.2).

• Dylanos_ (Ireland): the runner holding most of the mode’s world records; his full bio, run counts, record tally, and times live in Section 10.4-10.5.

• Dioji (Canada; community attested alias “frickboyfrank,” not publicly documented) wrote the Bhop Masterclass, the guide that taught the scene the bunny hop, the community discovered movement tech at the heart of the speedrun meta (see Section 5.2). On the boards, Dioji logged 85 runs with first places in Advanced Tracks S0/U2 (see Section 10.4).

• AceDelusional: speedrun.com super moderator on the main board and creator keeper of the sister Community Tracks board, which organized 65 creator made UEFN levels into community invented “seasons” S0-S2 plus Psyonix Maps categories (see Section 9.3, Section 10.3). AceDelusional also maintained the board’s map code spreadsheet and shared a community Discord, infrastructure that gave the mode a seasonal competitive structure Epic never provided (see Section 11.4).

• bigols (BigOlJimDaddy) built more Rocket Racing tracks than anyone else on record: 300+ maps across Competitive, Speed Run, Speedster, and Death Race formats, including the Twisty Touge, BOA Constrictor, Pumpkin Patch, and Swampy Slurpy series (see Section 9.2). Several of those maps (BOA Constrictor, Twisty Touge) became staples of the Community Tracks speedrun board (see Section 9.3).

• CheeQu (Greece) took silver in the SRC Series challenge, the mode’s only platform funded prized event ($150, Feb 2024, see Section 10.3), and is one of the 17 credited contributors to Havvak’s Comprehensive Guide (see Section 5). CheeQu also held top times in the board’s Competitive category, e.g. a 1:33.520 Competitive run (see Section 5.3).

• Ewarz (France) won the inaugural speedrun.com-funded SRC Series challenge (Feb 16-26, 2024) with a 24:12.387 combined run, taking the $250 first prize (see Section 10.3). His board record includes 206 Rocket Racing runs and first place in Expert Tracks Season 0 (see Section 10.4).

• B1gstretch (Canada) was the Community Tracks board’s dominant runner: across its 65 creator made levels (~157 runs from 42 players) he held the large majority of world records, the community built counterpart to Dylanos_’s grip on the Epic built boards (see Section 10.4-10.5, Section 11.4).

• ImPeQu: Epic Partner, UEFN creator, and dataminer whose June 22, 2024 leak of the two Track Select V2 screens (“Still not In-Game”) is the fullest public look at the front end redesign Rocket Racing never fully shipped (see Section 16). Earlier, ImPeQu surfaced the “Ouroboros” event map on December 3, 2023, the day after the Big Bang event; it shipped as the launch track Festive Falls (see Section 8.4).

• Wertandrew ran the “All issues with Rocket Racing UEFN tools” megathread on the Epic forums from March 29, 2024, nine days after the toolset opened (see Section 9.2). The thread fed a consolidated Epic ticket, FORT-743381; Epic closed it without a fix by January 8, 2025.

• Devin Connors: Psyonix senior community manager and one of the very few named developer voices in the mode’s public record (see Section 9.4). An ex esports employee reported marketing/PR/community cut to 1-2 people and the “dev side spread thin across projects,” context for Connors’ launch window admission: “we just didn’t have the capacity to do our normal video about rewards this season.”

• Garrett Williamson: composer and mix engineer, and the only first party credited musician on the entire Rocket Racing score; his own credits page lists “Fortnite: Rocket Racing (Composer / Mix Engineer) (2023).” Which tracks are his, and why every other artist attribution rests on file metadata and community uploads, is broken down in Section 14.

• Jose “Emroca” Flores: verified Senior Concept Artist at Epic Games in San Diego with a public Rocket League credit (see Section 9.4). His June 23 Instagram post of previously unshown, Jetsons inspired sky city Rocket Racing environment art (key art plus a ZBrush blockout) is the strongest visual evidence for the cancelled themed Season 3, matching the “skyscraper / heaven-futuristic-city” slot on the leaked 2024 roadmap (community inference, plausible but unconfirmed; full evidence chain in Section 16).