HTC Vive gets VR game from ‘Rick and Morty’ creator and The Stanley Parable designer

Virtual reality is going to get weird quickly.

William Pugh, the co-designer and writer of odd gaming experience The Stanley Parable, is working on a room-scale virtual reality game for the HTC Vive with Justin Roiland, creator of Adult Swim’s Rick and Morty. In an interview with Pocket Gamer, Pugh explained that he has started experimenting with the Vive, and it has him really excited about what he can do with it. After figuring out some of its capabilities, Pugh is going to meet up with Roiland, who has tweeted about making Vive games in the past.

That all sounds like ideal material for VR, which is a market (along with augmented reality) that tech adviser Digi-Capital predicts could generate as much as $120 billion in revenue by 2020. With that much money flooding the space, developers that jump in early could see a huge financial reward.

This collaboration is intriguing because both Pugh and Roiland seem to have the right kind of sensibility for making room-scale VR games. The Stanley Parable is a funny and mysterious world that players can explore. In a similar way, episodes of Rick and Morty are hilarious and shocking. Both creators seem to love surprising their audiences with universes that are reminiscent of The Twilight Zone. 

“In March, I’m gonna be flying out to L.A. like a bigshot and working with Justin Roiland on a short VR game,” Pugh told Pocket Gamer. “He’s really excited and working in the VR space, so we’ve been chatting for a while and have been, like, throwing around ideas about what to do or what we could make. We’ve both got no idea what’s gonna happen when we get in the same room — I’m sure it’ll be exciting and hopefully challenging to work on.”

Pugh certainly brings some legitimacy to Roiland’s projects. While the Rick and Morty producer also writes and does voices on the show, he’s never made a game before. Having someone who has successfully shipped a well-regarded piece of software before should help make these VR dreams (nightmares?) a reality.

“I know we’ll both be approaching it with very different mentalities about games,” said Pugh. “He’s not worked on a game before, and he’s got such marvelous and interesting ideas about, well, everything — If you’ve seen Rick and Morty, you can imagine what it might be like.”