Isaac “Turtle” App’s story in Rocket League begins long before there were sold out arenas and Monstercat anthems. In the first generation of the Rocket League Championship Series, he was one of the teenagers who helped define what pro play in North America looked like. As a player, he reached three straight RLCS World Championships alongside Garrett “GarrettG” Gordon and a rotating cast of teammates. Later he became one of the most recognizable voices on the RLCS broadcast and even contributed music to the official Rocket League soundtrack. His legacy in the esport rests on all three roles at once: player, commentator, and artist.
Phoenix, Soccer, And A Ranked Match With SadJunior
Isaac App grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, where video games sat alongside youth soccer as his main hobbies. According to Rocket League’s official Community Spotlight on Turtle, his grandmother bought him a Game Boy Advance SP, which led him into handheld games and eventually into PC titles like Team Fortress 2. YouTube became his main window into gaming culture, and by age eleven he was playing amateur TF2 tournaments online with teammates who were much older than he was.
Soccer remained his first love until a growth plate problem in his heel left him barely able to walk. High school sports were suddenly off the table, and he went looking for something that could fill the same competitive itch. When he discovered Rocket League, it felt like a direct substitute: the rhythm of soccer, but with flying cars and constant action. He poured hours into ranked play between classes and homework, without yet believing that esports might become a serious career.
The turning point came in a ranked game that matched him against Jayson “SadJunior” Nunez, already known in 2015 as one of the best early pros through stints on Cosmic Aftershock and iBUYPOWER. Turtle did not recognize the name at first, but his teammates did, and they kept the match close. Afterward he looked SadJunior up on Twitch, realized how many people were watching, and understood that he had just gone toe to toe with one of the world’s top players. He added his two random teammates, began playing small ESL tournaments with them, and the idea of trying to qualify for RLCS stopped sounding impossible.
VexX, Eanix, And The First RLCS Season
The trio that had impressed against SadJunior soon came under the banners VexX Gaming and later Eanix, forming one of the most promising young teams in North America. In the first Rocket League Championship Series season in 2016, VexX qualified through the open bracket and reached the North American group stage, with GarrettG, Jaysent “Jayyyrah” Urra, and Turtle on the roster.
Their success in online qualifiers carried them all the way to the inaugural RLCS World Championship. The Exodus roster that emerged from those early Eanix and VexX lineups, with GarrettG, Moses, and Turtle, finished in the top half of the Season 1 offline finals in Los Angeles. EsportsEarnings records show Turtle earning several hundred dollars from that first world championship appearance, a modest payout by later standards but a major validation for a teenager who had only recently left traditional school for homeschooling to focus on Rocket League.
Those early LANs also established the core of Turtle’s on field identity. Playing alongside GarrettG, he developed a style that mixed smart positioning with the willingness to challenge aggressively when momentum was on his side. Fans and commentators of the era often described those VexX and Exodus teams as the main domestic threats to the dominant iBUYPOWER roster, even if they fell short of unseating them at Season 1 Worlds.
Orbit And A Run At North America’s Crown
By the time Season 2 began in late 2016, Rocket League esports was starting to professionalize. Twitch had partnered with Psyonix, Mobil 1 and hardware brands were on the sponsor list, and organizations were signing the best unsigned rosters. In October 2016 the Exodus trio was picked up by Orbit Esports, putting Turtle on a fully backed organization for the first time.
Orbit immediately became one of the favorites in North America. During Season 2 league play they were often treated as the team to beat, and their head to head with NRG Esports set the tone for the region. ESPN’s pre finals power ranking described Orbit as the squad that had looked like the best team in NA for much of the season, only to be upset by NRG in the regional final.
On paper the results were still impressive. Orbit finished second in the RLCS Season 2 North American playoffs, qualifying for the Season 2 World Championship in Amsterdam. EsportsEarnings lists that regional runner up result, and the subsequent world championship appearance, among Turtle’s largest single tournament payouts, with roughly five thousand dollars between the two events.
In game, Season 2 was perhaps the high point of Turtle’s competitive career. With a stable trio that had been playing together since before RLCS existed, he and his teammates brought a structured North American style that leaned on rotations and counterattacks rather than pure mechanical flash. That approach kept them near the top of their region and delivered a repeat trip to the world stage, even if they never quite managed the deep world championship run many predicted.
Atelier, Rogue, And A Third Straight World Championship
The 2017 Season 3 cycle brought roster changes and a new chapter. After Orbit, the core split, and Turtle eventually landed with Atelier, a North American team that featured Sizz, Jacob “SadJunior” Nunez for a period, and other familiar veterans. Atelier placed near the top of NA league play in Season 3 and then finished second in the Season 3 NA championship, which again secured a world championship berth for Turtle.
Shortly before RLCS Season 3 Worlds, Atelier’s roster was signed by Rogue. Under that banner, Turtle traveled to London for his third consecutive world championship appearance. Rogue exited in the 5th to 6th range at Worlds, but the story of the event from a North American perspective centered on their presence as a new major org and on how their young core handled the pressure of facing Europe and Oceania on LAN.
Turtle’s profile in the wider esports media grew during this stretch. Yahoo Esports ran a feature interview titled “Worthy of the NA hype: Turtle on Rogue’s Rocket League World Championship performance,” which framed him as both a representative of his region and a spokesperson for its ambitions on the international stage.
By the end of Season 3, his results looked like a neat arc. Three RLCS seasons, three world championship appearances, a second place in the NA regional playoffs, and more than ten thousand dollars in total prize money in 2017 alone. EsportsEarnings notes that by the time he turned eighteen he had already collected more than eighteen thousand dollars in earnings from Rocket League tournaments, representing nearly ninety percent of his eventual career total.
G2, Dignitas, And The End Of The Playing Chapter
After Rogue, Turtle had a brief run with G2 Esports, primarily as a substitute during the RLCS Season 4 era. Rocket League Esports Wiki lists him as a backup option during the Season 4 North American league play cycle, behind the starting lineup of Kronovi, JKnaps, and Rizzo. It was a sign of how far his reputation had come that he was trusted as a bench piece for one of the most famous brands in the game.
The final phase of his competitive career came in 2018, when he joined Dignitas for RLRS Season 5 in North America. EsportsEarnings records Dignitas results that year, including a fourth place RLRS finish and a run at DreamHack Leipzig 2018 that added another thousand and five hundred dollars respectively to his total winnings.
Behind the scenes, however, his motivation was changing. In the Rocket League Community Spotlight, Turtle recalls that around age eighteen he felt he could no longer keep up with the next wave of prodigies. He cited teammates like Chicago and European stars such as Scrubkilla as examples of younger players whose mechanical ceiling seemed out of reach, no matter how many hours he put into practice. That realization, combined with a growing passion for music production, nudged him toward retirement from full time competition.
By 2018 he effectively stepped away from pro play. His official earnings profile shows a sharp drop in tournament winnings after that year, with only small amounts recorded in 2020, 2021, and 2022 as one off appearances rather than sustained league competition.
From Octane To Headset: Becoming An RLCS Caster
The second act of Turtle’s Rocket League career began with an email. While he was in his first semester of college, having assumed that his time in Rocket League was finished, the RLCS production team reached out to ask if he would join the broadcast for a single weekend. He accepted, expecting to sit on the analyst desk. Instead they asked him to cast games alongside James “Jamesbot” Villar, a role for which he had no formal training.
In the same Community Spotlight he describes burying himself in VODs of his favorite casters, especially FindableCarpet and Shogun, and spending the week before his debut listening to broadcasts while he worked out or studied. The first day on air was marked by nerves and a fear of silence, but as the weekend went on the anxiety turned into excitement. He began to approach casting as watching Rocket League with a friend and sharing the experience with the audience, rather than as a technical lecture.
What was supposed to be a one off appearance turned into a full time role. Turtle told Rocket League Esports staff that he loved commentating and wanted to keep doing it, and within weeks he was being invited back for more events. According to Psyonix’s own write up, he “parked his Octane in the garage for good and picked up the headset in 2018,” quickly becoming a fixture on RLCS broadcasts.
By 2019 he was recognized widely as a member of the global talent pool. Red Bull’s viewer guide to the RLCS Season 7 World Championship highlighted him as a former pro turned caster and even noted moments when he was lifted on stage to join in the celebrations. Community discussions on Reddit referred to him as a rookie caster of the year candidate and praised his energetic style as he settled into the role.
Over the next several RLCS seasons, he worked countless regional broadcasts and majors, providing color commentary and analysis for North American and international matches. Podcasts like Salt Cast and Chasing Grand Champ brought him on as a guest to talk through his journey and his mindset, cementing his place in the broader Rocket League media ecosystem as someone who could explain the game from both a player’s and a commentator’s perspective.
The casting chapter had its own endpoint. In early 2024, when RLCS underwent major structural changes under new tournament organizers, several fan favorite casters, including Turtle, announced that they would not be returning to the official broadcast. Coverage from outlets like Dexerto documented the community backlash when names like Isaac “Turtle” App, Corelli, and Spaceman were cut from the on air lineup.
Even with that break, the years from 2018 to 2023 left a clear impression. For viewers who discovered Rocket League during that period, Turtle was part of the default sound of RLCS: high energy, open about his emotions, and unafraid to show both hype and frustration on air.
Music, Monstercat, And The Rocket League Soundtrack
While his casting career was taking off, Turtle was investing equal energy into music. He learned to produce hip hop and rap tracks through YouTube tutorials and gradually assembled a catalog of songs released under his own name. The Community Spotlight notes that making music became a necessity for him, a way to replace the social interaction he missed while grinding games and working remote events.
His two careers intersected directly when Rocket League began using his tracks in promotional material and in game playlists. The same Psyonix feature mentions his song “Fall,” which was used to announce an RLCS Winter Major and later appeared as “Fall (Clean)” on the Rocket League x Monstercat track list.
In 2022 he reached another milestone when “Moment (Worlds Version),” a collaboration with streamer Athena and producer smle, became part of Rocket League’s official soundtrack. Monstercat’s own documentation and the Rocket League soundtrack page list the song as Athena and smle’s debut Uncaged release and Isaac App’s debut Monstercat release, featured under the Rocket League x Monstercat banner and used around RLCS World Championship programming.
Media outlets outside esports have picked up on that crossover. A feature on the music site Acento en la O describes Turtle as a beloved RLCS caster and notes that he produced the World Championship song “Moments” under the Monstercat label, while also releasing independent tracks and videos like “TANGO” and “SWITCH.”
In practical terms, this makes his Rocket League legacy unusually multi layered. His name appears on tournament result pages as a player, on broadcast talent announcements as a caster, and on official soundtrack lists as a musician. There are few figures in the esport whose fingerprints show up in as many different parts of its ecosystem.
Legacy And Place In Rocket League History
Measured strictly by trophies, Turtle’s playing career sits just outside the pantheon of world champions. He never lifted an RLCS trophy and did not lead a team to a grand final. His best results were second place finishes in North American regional championships and respectable top six placements at world championships during the first three seasons. He earned a bit over twenty one thousand dollars across thirty eight tournaments, with most of that money coming before his eighteenth birthday.
Yet focusing only on prize money misses what made his impact distinctive. As part of VexX, Exodus, and Orbit, he helped establish North America’s identity in the early RLCS era at a time when the region was still trying to prove it could match Europe. His partnership with GarrettG became one of the foundational duos in NA history, laying the groundwork for GarrettG’s later world championship run with NRG and proving that young players from online ladders could transition successfully to LAN.
His second act as a caster arguably reached even more fans. For several years anyone tuning into RLCS was likely to hear Turtle’s voice on at least one series, whether in league play, majors, or world championships. Official sources and community conversations alike characterize him as someone whose enthusiasm helped translate high level mechanical play into accessible entertainment, especially for newer viewers who needed someone to verbalize why a particular save or offensive rotation mattered.
The music chapter adds a third dimension. Instead of simply being a former player who became a commentator, he turned Rocket League into both a workplace and a platform for his art. Songs like “Fall” and “Moment (Worlds Version)” now sit alongside classic Monstercat tracks in the game’s playlists, meaning that his creative work will continue to play in menus, trailers, and broadcasts long after any single tournament result has faded from memory.
Taken together, Isaac “Turtle” App’s legacy in Rocket League is that of a bridge figure. He represents the moment when talented ranked players could still climb directly into RLCS, the transition from early grassroots leagues to a full broadcast product, and the expansion of Rocket League’s culture to include its own music ecosystem. For an Esports Legacy Profile, he is less the archetype of the all time champion and more a case study in how a single person can help build an esport from several different positions at once.