Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades Celebrates Guns As Complex Mechanisms
Mundane moments simulated in H3VR understand why people shoot guns better than any other software.
Handling a gun means understanding how to operate a complex mechanical object.
Everyone knows you pull the trigger to fire, but there’s also a whole universe to experience in the interactions before, during and after that moment which do not exist in any software except Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades. RUST LTD.’s 10-year journey building H3VR relentlessly explored that space week by week to develop those complex physical interactions.
The journey begins around here in 2016 in Anton Hand’s developer log:
And it wraps up around here in 2026:
When you include H3VR’s community as part of what this project is, it becomes clear this simulation is not just software — it’s a staggering work of performance art that represents the maturation of an artist and his collaborators in the age of the Internet. H3VR reaches with two hands into VR and grasps what traditional games overlooked as too mundane to be interesting for the press of a button. In these moments and their interactions H3VR proves VR’s worth not as a videogame platform but as a place worth visiting for long stretches of time.
Here at Good Virtual Reality you can peek inside the mind of developer Anton Hand across two podcasts, one each covering H3VR1 and H3VR2.
For the addition of H3VR to the Certified Good Virtual Reality Collection I reached out to the people who spent hundreds to thousands of hours inside this masterpiece and asked them to tell me what it means to them. Below are some selected comments I received over email with bolding added for emphasis and a few corrected typos:
Admiral Snackbar: Originally I had written off H3VR as just a gun sandbox / shooting range that I wasn’t really interested in, although I was aware of it. Sometime in December 2019 I was playing Windlands 2 co-op with a random online person and as we were chatting, he kept raving about H3VR and especially the rogue-lite mode of take and hold. He told me about how there were over 300 guns (at the time - now we’re around 500+) and how it was way more than a shooting range. I said I’d get it on sale and he told me - it doesn’t, so I bought it that day. Over 400 hours of game time later, having participated in multiple take and hold tournaments, there is no better game in my eyes for VR. There are other great VR games for sure and I have a list of favorites, but none of them approach the depth of interaction and true skill development that is present in H3VR. I think that comes from the raw time and energy spent in developing it for a decade. Armswinging Movement has been refined to a degree not seen anywhere else. It’s the only VR game that has had this kind of longevity for me and had me coming back for years. For me personally, H3VR has become my comfort game and place to blow off steam. Especially during the pandemic when it felt like everything was crashing down, I could escape to a place where I could take out my frustrations, running through concrete hallways, listen to some music or a podcast, and blast hot dog soldiers as they utter comical one liners.
Hoyt: For me I think H3VR is about community. Its kind of weird to say that about a single player VR game, even putting on VR goggles is an isolating act. And for the first couple hundred hours of my playtime that’s what it was, me vs the hotdogs. But then I found the tournament scene. Once a year tons of people in the community get together to have a live-broadcasted and live-commented community run tournament and it is an amazing experience. The creativity, kindness and enthusiasm of the H3 community is second to none, and for a few months every year I get to hang out with some truly great people from all over the world and celebrate this game we all have hundreds or thousands of hours in together…When people finish a tournament run, we let the audience ask questions and its a running joke to ask them one of the sosig lines: “Why hotdogs?” and my answer is that I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Mr. King: H3VR has been in my life since i was 17 I learned about H3 from NerdCubed when they did a video covering the game around Update... 40ish and that was the moment i knew i need to get into the VR ecosystem….For me H3VR is the VR game that should be looked at and studied. Its mechanics its style the way it tackles locomotion, it pushed VR to its limits.
KTU (writing through Japanese to English translation): After saving enough money, I bought a gaming PC, an Oculus Rift S, and H3VR. I still vividly remember the first time I handled a firearm in VR. It was an unforgettable experience. Since then, I’ve watched every weekly Devlog that Anton has uploaded. Every update brought something new to explore, and I would spend countless hours enjoying all the new content. Take and Hold quickly became my favorite game mode, and I’ve spent the vast majority of my 1,300+ hours playing it.
Waddicker: H3VR is the entire reason I even considered buying VR in the first place, despite how primitive it was by comparison at the time. I bought H3VR on July 8th 2016, nearly 10 years ago and the very same day I received my first VR headset. Ever since that day I had played, watched, and kept up with H3VR’s development keenly, pouring hundreds of hours into the game. I was vocal on all the spaces that existed for the game at the time, the steam forums, the reddit, etc. It wasn’t until December 2016 that H3VR began to truly change my life and become more than just a game I was following, where I contributed an illustration I made to the game’s first Meatmas Contest. I ended up winning one of the awards and had my art presented inside the game’s old Meatmas Snowglobe scene, alongside a physical package sent by Anton himself of which I still have all the contents of today...His community understands him and he understands his community, both able to talk with and understand each other on such a level field that it’s unlike any other game I’ve seen in recent years.
Tim: I’m a Mechanical Engineering PhD Candidate in Canada. H3VR to me will always be a game I look fondly on, even years from now. I bought my first VR headset, an Oculus Rift S, the week before the Covid-19 lockdowns landed. Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades was one of the first titles I bought after perusing some lists of best VR titles. Once I got over the initial learning curve of VR gaming, I was hooked. Like many, the lockdown was a tough time. H3VR provided a good outlet for gaming, especially as I started to get good at the Take and Hold game mode. Through chasing the leaderboard I got involved in the First to Wurst community, competing in a few of their tournaments. As a fun fact, I am actually the one who designed and 3D printed the very first First to Wurst physical trophy (though I only made it to the quarter finals). Finding such a fun, vibrant community was a great balm for the trials of the Covid lockdowns…I often joke that it ruined VR shooters for me because of how good it is. While I do not have the time to play it as much as I did, I am forever grateful for the experiences I had and the chance to connect with people in another fun community in a dark time.
Hydro: I have about 250 hours at the time of writing. I got the game in 2024, around the time I got my Quest 2, but I haven't played it too much until 2025. I've been following Anton's work since 2018 or 2019, when I saw Jedit's silly reload videos, and Take N Hold runs. These videos alone made me in awe over how interesting the game looked, how the guns functioned, the whole ordeal making my interest in firearms spring back into my life…H3VR Has changed my love for VR From "It's a little niche thing that I like to use for socializing" to "A dream come true in physically draining myself while having a lot of fun" and a safe haven for my interests in firearms, while living in a country that has strict firearm laws. From deep of my heart, thank you Anton for making this game, it's been a life changer for me.
Team Skyborne: I picked up the game in May of 2017, and have just shy of 530 hours since then…I got an original Vive back in 2016 after trying in-store demos over and over, and H3VR popped up on my radar in its early forms while I was still playing basic things like Job Simulator, The Lab, and Space Pirate Trainer. They were good, but what became H3VR caught my interest because of the depth of simulation and the iteration that the project was going through. H3's development made me excited for VR because it was a look into someone doing serious independent research into what kind of interactions were actually possible, and the frequent devlogs made me interested in seeing what kind of ways the tech could be built upon. All these years later, it's still my go-to any time I want some shooty action, especially with Take and Hold in its modern form and the large community of modders who've added their own contributions to what the game has to offer.
Nick: I first got into VR in 2019, just a few months before COVID hit and everything shut down. I was a sophomore in high school at the time, so when I wasn’t working on academics, I was typically playing video games. I also purchased H3VR during the pandemic. H3VR has been a part of my life for over 6 years now, and it has been with me through high school, college, job changes, and many other things that life has thrown at me. There are very few games that have stuck with me for this long. I was actually playing H3VR last night, and as I was slaughtering some Rotwieners, I was reflecting on how much this game means to me, and how I have always returned to it despite numerous big changes in my life.
And some selected comments from Reddit:
“I love that the game really started as a way for Anton to dick around with vr and it's resulted in one of the best dicking around games ever made”
“I’m from a country that guns are totally illegal, and going to a shooting range is extremely difficult, unless you’re friend of someone who is in the armed forces. So, unlikely, this is the only opportunity that i have to be as close to shoot a gun in my entire life…”
It gives me nearly everything I want from guns and in some aspects far more than I could get regular. And all that in my living room, for the cost of one decent gun without any legal hassle.
H3VR meatmas was always there for me when my family couldn’t be.
H3VR has been with me for a large chunk of my life. Its outlasted relationships, friendships, and transition. The weekly devlogs were something consistent i could look forward to when I didnt have much else to and, though maybe this is a bit cringy to say, honestly the desire to see what comes next week after week kept me going a lot longer than i would've
To me, H3 is the pinnacle of VR gaming, along side VTOL VR. These are the two games I always recommend to people when they're getting into VR. I always see threads here on reddit talking about Boneworks this, HL:A that, and I always try to advocate for our silly little hotdog shooter. No one does guns better, be it vr or flatscreen, in my opinion.
H3VR was one of the main reasons I bought a PC. I spent years watching YouTube videos before finally being able to play it myself. I love the attention to detail and how in depth the guns are. I’ve probably spent close to 300 hours just in take and hold beating off wieners.
I had been following the development since I was still in elementary school in late 2016 Ive watched every single devlog that was ever posted hoping that when I got a decent gaming PC and an VR headset that I would play the shit out of H3. It’s currently my longest played VR game double the hours of the two runner ups Pavlov and ITR1.
First got this game in spring of 2016 when i was in like 8th grade and was one of the only people in my friend group that had VR and thus got a lot of people into vr letting them come and play it. Im now turning 24 with a masters degree and still fire the game up when i feel like shooting but the weather isn’t good enough to hit the real range
When I had space for my VR rig to be set up, H3VR was a fantastic physics playground that just happens to have guns.
H3VR has been like crack for me; it scratches an itch I didn’t know I had, in ways I didn’t know were possible. I’ve had the game since Feb 15th of 2021 and have almost clocked 1,000 hours, which would make it the 3rd game in library to do so. If I were to take a guess as to why I love this game so much, I’d say it’s because I love guns but don’t own any myself. The interactions with the firearms are some of the best in VR…
Lastly, I also reached out to one of RUST LTD.’s co-founders Luke Noonan for his thoughts about H3VR. Here’s why he thinks H3VR is successful:
First, many VR titles optimize, first and foremost, for the initial 5-20 minute experience. There are plenty of reasons to do that, from marketing to battery life. But that is not what we did in H3VR. The first hour of H3 can, honestly, be pretty rough for a new player. But for the players that make it through that, the simulation depth, humor, and subtle world building, make H3VR one of the few places in VR that really rewards extended engagement. H3VR is optimized for hours 2 through 200.
The second thing was Anton’s environmental design. He built the environments knowing that he would have to spend hundreds of hours in them and as a result they were very nice spaces to spend time in. All video games are virtual worlds, if you want people to spend hundreds or even thousands of hours in your virtual world, you have to make it a compelling place to spend time. Based on the number of users who have told stories about how they hop into the game to relax after work, I think that Anton’s calm, restrained approach to environmental design really resonated with players.
The third thing that has really made this game such an enduring success is something we can only take a little credit for: the community. There are all the content creators making videos, the tens of thousands of people who hang out in our discord server/subreddit/steam forums/etc. and the handful of people that built the truly epic IMFDB page. But a ton of credit has to go to our modding community. Even with a decade of early access development time, there are limits to what we have been able to build. So many people in the community found one of those limits and said “no problem, I’ll build that myself”. The sheer amount of time the community has spent watching, reading, and playing community made stuff is awesome.
H3VR is available on Steam for $19.99.
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