I’ll never forget the day I put on a virtual reality (VR) headset for the first time, it was on September 4th. I got the chance to go hands on with ‘Rick and Morty Simulator- Virtual Rick-ality’ on the HTC Vive from Adult Swim Games and Owlchemy Labs at Pax West 2016. I placed the headpiece up to my eyes and, quite suddenly, found myself in a wholly other world.
Maybe it was something I ate, maybe not. It started off with a VR-view of Rick’s garage-laboratory. I found out that I was a Morty clone and was immediately instructed to wash Rick’s clothes in the garage. Rick insulted me on how slow I was at performing the task, and once I was finished, I was shot in the face and sent to Purgatory. What is that ringing noise in my ears? (I thought) There is a phone in Purgatory ringing?!? I picked it up. I couldn’t quite here the message since I didn’t position the phone to my ear properly. I assume it said something like “You Effed up, try again”. I was immediately transported back to the garage and told to get a package out of the driveway using the Meeseeks box located at Rick’s crafting station. I pressed the Meeseeks button and a ball appeared. I grabbed the ball, threw it on the ground, and a virtual Meeseeks appeared. Then…a wild storm starts and Rick tells me to pull the lever to activate the blast shields around the house. I do this and a portal appears in front of me. Rick urges me to go through it. I walk through the portal onto a platform in the middle of space only to see Rick and Morty on a different far away platform with Rick shouting and promoting ‘Rick and Morty Simulator: Virtual Rick-ality’. If that wasn’t enough awesome I was told to look down and I was standing on the edge of the UNIVERSE!
The Adult Swim hit show ‘Rick and Morty’ has taken over this world, and very soon the virtual world will also succumb to antics. The demo was brief but left me affected. For better or worse, I’m not sure. However, being a gamer pretty much all my life and being content with the new generation of consoles I still wanted to experience a new way of playing games, that felt significant and a generation leap forward. ‘Rick and Morty Simulator: Virtual Rick-ality’ was that for me. Be excited! There are a lot of things on the horizon that will soon become a reality.
Listen to Cy Wise from Owlchemy Labs break it down here:
https://soundcloud.com/poppundits/rick-and-morty-simulator-virtual-rick-ality-hands-on-wcy-wise-1