Two minutes into my conversation with Gorilla Tag creator Kerestell Smith, I fully understood why his game has become such a phenomenon. The virtual reality hangout game that invites you to “reject humanity and become a gorilla” hosts a million players daily on Quest and Steam. These are practically the numbers from Counter-Strike 2; an unimaginably large audience for VR. Despite its modest (yet memorable) aesthetic and simplistic sandbox gameplay, the free-to-play game celebrated 12 million lifetime players and $100 million in revenue this summer. And there were no signs of slowing down either.
Smith, known as Lemming by his fans, and his team at Another Axiom Inc. have managed to crack the code and attract the massive audience every VR developer dreams of, and after seeing him at PAX West earlier this year met, I realized pretty quickly how he did it: he just receives What makes VR cool?
The axioms of a successful VR game
“We paid a lot of attention to that sense of authenticity,” he tells me as we hide in a dark corner of the esports lounge at GameWorks in Seattle. There's a game meeting going on at the arcade, and when I arrive I find Lemming surrounded by a hundred excited fans, all wearing banana hats. “You want to be able to relate to it because people will be able to identify with it. If you just put something in there that you feel like, um, then maybe people will like it, I think people feel that way too.”
Lemming was inspired to do “Gorilla Tag” after his professional career as a competitive player at Echo Arena. He immediately connected with Zero-G gameplay and realized how immersive and immersive VR can be when done right.
“This game gives such a powerful experience of what it would be like to be in zero gravity,” he explains. “If you just close your eyes and imagine what it would be like to grab the wall, push off of it and float away, and then see your legs floating in front of you as you drift backwards – when you play the game, that is the experience you have from top to bottom. It feels exactly how you imagine it would. This feeling is so intense. You just want to feel that more.”
This feeling of authenticity is exactly what he wanted to capture with Gorilla Tag.
“If it's a disconnecting experience, then it's something that next time you think, 'Should I put the headset on?' You might think that I don't feel like it. But when the world is built to make you feel like yourself want The attraction of being in it is very strong,” he says.
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For Gorilla Tag's 12 million players, that appeal is strong enough to overcome the common complaints and criticisms of VR. “A lot of the discussion around VR is about the fact that some parts might be a little uncomfortable, or that you have to worry about whether it's charged, whether the headset is too tight, and whether the graphics might not be perfect. I firmly believe that these are the things you notice when the experience isn’t engaging enough.”
“If it's a disconnecting experience, then it's something that next time you think, 'Should I put the headset on?' You might think that I don't feel like it. But when the world is built to make you feel like yourself
want
Being in it, that attraction is very strong,”
When developing Gorilla Tag, Lemming discovered how difficult it is to find the right balance. “It's a really strong feeling, but it's easy to break,” he explains.
VR still has many physical limitations that clever developers can work around. You can't move freely through space, you can't always interact with physical objects. When you push your gorilla arms against the ground as you move around the world in Gorilla Day, you can't really feel the earth beneath your hairy palms. But Lemming is able to conjure the illusion that the world around you is real, and that is a great achievement.
Echo Arena was a big inspiration for Gorilla Tag
Inspired by his experience in Echo Arena, Lemming discovered how to turn something potentially immersion-breaking into one of the game's greatest strengths
“The cool thing about hand-based movements is that when you push off with your hand, you are pushed back,” he says. “Suddenly the relationship is no longer one-dimensional. I don't just swirl around the world. I push the world and the world pushes me back, and that creates such a strong relationship with your surroundings.” Lemming believes the headset and visuals are just part of what creates a visceral VR experience. “It's the part where you can interact with your hands and feel the environment, that's what really transports you into the world.”
Creating something that could only exist in VR and that capitalized on the medium's greatest strengths was both Lemming's inspiration and the source of Gorilla Tag's enormous success. “I've tried to really pay attention to that as we build things. “You have to give players a reason to put on the headset,” explains Lemming. “That feeling of wanting to be in the world, I think that’s the key.”
This physical connection is only part of the immersion formula. Lemming explains that the other half of the equation is creating a self-consistent world that follows a set of rules that the player can understand and live within without getting bogged down or distracted by control schemes and menus . “I have to learn to deal with this world, but once I do, I don’t really have to suspend my disbelief,” he explains. “This suspension of disbelief comes from things that hurt this world. When something appears out of nowhere, you hit a loading screen, or you teleport somewhere – all of those things that take you out of the experience and remind you that you're playing a video game – if you clear out all of those things as much as possible , now you just have the experience: 'I'm in this different place.'”
Finally, Lemming's third axiom of immersion is the social aspect. He believes that true virtual reality requires a shared human experience where one can interact with other people in that environment. Sharing space is the most important thing. It's one thing to be on a video call or Discord channel with others where there is an inherent distance between you that creates an unconscious disconnect. “But when you feel like you’re in this real place and other people are there too, it’s so cool,” says Lemming. “There is nothing like it.” For Lemming, using VR to connect with other people is the technology's greatest strength and most important application. “I just don’t see any way that VR can’t be successful in the long term,” he says. “This experience is so valuable on an interpersonal level. We need that special connection, and VR can provide it in a way that no other technology can.”
Focusing on these core principles has made Gorilla Tag one of the most successful VR games of all time. It is a real virtual reality space where people can relax and socialize. It's exactly the kind of metaverse that big tech companies dream of, and yet this silly gorilla game actually managed to crack the code. I asked Lemming why he believes this, and he tells me it's largely a result of his inability to imagine a bigger picture.
“I think there are a lot of people who have big, great ideas, they have a vision for the future. I have big problems with that,” he explains. “I feel like I've done a good job of paying attention to the work that's been done and seeing what I find valuable about these different experiences and what I connect with. We don’t approach things from the perspective of “Where do we want to get to?” It's just a matter of being aware of what's working right now. What experiences do we connect with? How do we want to expand these things?”
The studio is bringing the same values to its next game, Orion Drift, a sci-fi VR game that leans even more closely on the style and aesthetic of Echo Arena and increases the size of social lobbies to 200 players. Lemming compares the experience to a conference. “You're still going to focus on interpersonal interactions with small groups of people, but doing it in the context of this larger space adds something more to it. You can play in a 3v3 match and at the same time hear another match taking place next to you. You feel like you’re part of something bigger.”
“I don't feel like we've created anything with Gorilla Tag. I feel like we've found something that's incredibly valuable, and something like this will be successful if you build on it because people have such a strong connection to it.”
With Orion Drift, the team hopes to create seamless social spaces where you can play a game and then walk over and watch another, or meet with different groups of people and move naturally through different groups and social encounters. “These are the experiences you only have in real life that didn’t really exist in games like this.”
Despite its huge success, Lemming Gorilla sees Tag as just the foundation of what he hopes VR will achieve. “You hear about films like Casablanca, Gone With the Wind or Pulp Fiction and people say they're pretty good, but they're all so full of tropes. But that's because they created them. I hope Gorilla Day is seen as something like that one day.
Reject humanity.
Run, climb and jump in VR with a unique locomotion method that requires only the movement of your hands and arms. No buttons, no sticks, no teleportation. Push off surfaces to jump and squeeze with both hands to climb.
There are four different game modes – from simple tag mode for up to 3 players to infection mode for 4 or more players. Hunting game mode gives you a unique personal target to hunt. Paintbrawl is a team-versus-team paintball battle using slingshots.
Run away from the other gorillas or outmaneuver the survivors to capture them. Parkour on trees and cliffs to avoid and chase the monk. Hang out with randos in a virtual jungle or team up with friends in a private room to hang out and play. The stakes are low, so feel free to just chat or invent your own games. The movement is easy to learn but difficult to master. Crossplay with the PC versions of the game, so play with anyone on any platform.
There are six different levels to explore. Each with its own topography forming routes and obstacles to play with.
Visit our store in town for a rotating selection of items to buy, play with and wear to express your true monk.
Become a gorilla.
