Good Virtual Reality Month 4: Rec Room Ends But H3VR2 & Sock Puppet Superstar Are Just Beginning

From Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades to Sock Puppet Superstar.

Excitement for Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades 2 reinvigorates VR gamers and those who’ve been waiting for something to draw them back to their headsets.

My two-hour conversation with RUST LTD.’s Anton Hand starts with a kid in 1993 making his first digital art — an icon of a train his dad swapped out for the “My Computer” icon on every PC he ever owned — and the story continues to an artist making a living in Second Life and ends in the present, asking whether he sold out taking money from Meta for a sequel to one of the most loved PC VR games ever made. To drive wishlists to Steam and Quest the studio drip-feeds clips across social media showing the most advanced firearm handling ever designed for a mass market simulation.

When you see clips from an in-development game like H3VR2 driving intense desire to experience simulation first-hand and then again in the silly antics of Sock Puppet Superstar from developer Brandon Montell, you can see that VR remains the ultimate space for passionate people to play and explore even if shifting hardware, software and business priorities imploded the current market prospects.

“It was not a business market-driven decision to start working on it,” Montell says of his puppets on the Good VR Podcast. “And if it had been, I probably wouldn't have started working on it.”

Shawn Whiting shared insight from his time in Dreadhalls that, when making your way down a dark hallway in VR, the limited field of view of the optics can seem to disappear at the edges and increase the feeling of immersion tremendously. Whiting was the head of community at Rec Room for more than eight years and he joined the podcast to walk through the surreal feeling watching that VR playground shut down.

“Rec Room was always pretty much predicated on VR blowing up in a way that it hasn’t really,” said co-founder Cameron ‘Gribbly’ Brown in an AMA video published on the day of its closure. “VR has continued to be pretty popular, but it hasn’t really exploded and become this huge mainstream hit that we really needed it to.”

There’s more to say and learn from the idea Rec Room “needed” a certain level of adoption to justify its $350 million investment, instead of developers just following the fun as Hand and Montell do. I’d point to the part of the conversation with Whiting where I recap Jesse Schell’s bewilderment that the flat-screen version of Among Us 3D failed to reach people in the same way the VR version did as an important insight about the unique value of embodiment in a headset, as well as the incredible risk developers take on building a bridge from VR to mobile phones and other traditional screens with the wrong incentives around engagement and interactions.

If you have time for just one story of human interest to listen to from Good Virtual Reality in May, I encourage you to listen to the story of Rafael Brochado and Sahand Malaei’s team from Iran. Working together from afar, through war, their project Banners & Bastions is a story of artists and developers taking inspiration from one another and then reaching out through the Internet to grasp one another and pull themselves closer together. When I first booted up Banners & Bastions I spent nearly three hours of my time enjoying its Thronefall-like mechanics adapted to three dimensions.

The first three projects to receive the “Certified Good VR” badge are Titans of Space, Walkabout Mini Golf, and Banners & Bastions. I’ll be certifying more projects in June when I’m back from the Augmented World Expo.

Looking forward, I’m curious to see what Job Simulator developer Devin Reimer builds next after his exploratory voice-controlled project Stellar Cafe and I’m looking forward to “fist my bump” with Rocky in the upcoming Project Hail Mary experience from Maze Theory due out at the end of the year.

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