id’s Hugo Martin on the Challenges of Adapting Games to VR

That's my hope for the future, is that games are like that and you're actually gonna be able to exercise doing that. Because I think that if you had a game where you're in a warehouse and you're actually running for your life, and demons are chasing you and you're shooting down things, like your heart rate would be jacked. You could do that for an hour and get a sick workout in and have an amazing good time. That would be awesome. You can get in great shape running from demons. You would. I wouldn't have to get up so early in the fucking morning. Well, think about this game. If you could play this game, but you could play this game in a warehouse where you have all of the boxes and all those stairs. They're all real stairs and real boxes. Yeah, yeah. You're running around this pre-designed map and you're actually engaging with these VR demons with a haptic feedback. Fucking glory killing them. Yeah. Ripping out their parts. You're really into this glory killing, but the really problem with this calling it glory killing is it sounds too much like glory hole. It really does. Right, Jamie? Yeah. Do you agree? They have a new ride that got announced today for, I guess, out here at Disneyland, the new Marvel Avengers campus is gonna be opening up in the summer. They have a Spider-Man ride where it sounds like you put on a 3D headset, I think just goggles, and somehow they're tracking your hands. So during the ride, you shoot things for points. Oh. And then there's a- With your spider web. Then there's a leaderboard outside the ride for weekly, daily, and monthly stuff. So you and your family can get tracked and be like, oh, we're the best at this ride. Oh, you're gonna get addicted. That's how they get you. The- A lot of sounds so awesome. The level of sophistication going on with the games, whether you're mouse and keyboard or controller though, it would be hard to achieve in VR. I think VR offers a very specific, unique, and fucking amazing experience. And I would just separate the two. When we're making VR games, we're definitely trying to do something else, which is cool in and of itself. But there's not only just in our game, but in a lot of games, there's just resource management. There's high-leveled skill metashit happening. I mean, you know, you play fucking Quake. That's hard to reproduce in VR in certain ways, at least at this time. But I think that's the thing. It happens a lot in games where people want to take how you feel or how a movie engages you and apply it to a game. And I think it's like, let a game be its own. Let a game be a game. Let a movie be a movie. Let VR be its own fucking experience. That looks fucking awesome. Yeah. But yeah, if we just- Yeah, so still though, yeah, I would love to kill a demon. We have the VR game. I should just play it. But what I'm saying is like if someone made a Doom warehouse where you guys take a 14,000 square foot warehouse, just outfit it specifically for Doom, you got a line around the block of psychopaths waiting to play that thing for one hour. I mean, seriously, especially somewhere like Texas, where there's a bunch of warehouses, like you can find some warehouse district where you can get three or four of them and set them up for different maps in the game. That'd be fucking awesome. God damn, man. I mean, they're real close to being able to do something like that where it would be really accurate to, where you could have like a laser sight on your rifle and you know, you could see things through your goggles and- That'd be fucking badass. Although- It's the future. It is. It's the future, Hugo. It's lame. I was not lame. You know, Carmack can do anything he wants, but he's doing AI now. Like he's not doing VR anymore. I heard he was just consulting with Oculus, but now he's pursuing AI. Well, let's be honest. He's too smart. He is. He's too smart. He's from another planet. Him and Elon Musk can get together and share notes. Yes. They're both super wizards. Yeah, totally. He's, I mean, I'm sure he feels challenged by AI. Yeah. And, you know- He likes to challenge. He's a very interesting guy to talk to, too. I really enjoy talking to him. Yeah, he is awesome. And you really think about what he's accomplished in the world of video games. I mean, he's the Mac Daddy. Amazing. He really is. He's the guy who started it all, really. If you enjoy 3D games, that's the guy. Do you guys keep your eye open for where VR is headed and things like that and go, well, not yet. We're not ready for that yet, but one day down the road, we'll have something like that? Kind of a different, again, like where it's sort of like with cars. I went to school for automotive design. Oh, really? Yeah. I went to- How'd you wind up in video games? Just because I love video games. The training in automotive design. Have you ever been to Art Center? No. Dude, you should fucking go. It's fucking possible. Where is it? It's in Pasadena. Oh, okay. It's like the Harvard of design schools. They do cars there and products, but yeah, the cars that they have on display, the big clay models about that big, they're fucking amazing and really, really amazing place. The design process that you learn there, you can apply to kind of anything. I would say anything, but a lot of things. Certainly a video game, for sure. Because it's actually the questions you're asking, which is like, how do you start from nothing to something? That involves large groups of people, and you kind of learn that there. I forgot your original question. But oh yeah, no. It's like, so I use a lot of car analogies at the office quite a bit. It's kind of like we make a race car. And if VR is something else that's like an SUV, that's like just another kind of car. We kind of perfected how to make race cars. And it's been doing it since the 90s. Doom Eternal is just another race car. I understand what you're saying. I'm just thinking that as augmented reality and then virtual reality become more and more accessible to consumers, I'm wondering where video games are headed. I'm wondering if you think that's where they're headed or if you think there's always going to be a place for them on an actual video game. Or on an actual computer rather. I think there'll always be a place for them in the actual video game. I think that's where my focus is. Other people like Karmak are looking to see where, well not anymore, but where video games were going to go next. But I am fully focused on where they are now and how to make what they are now better. Thanks for watching.