Lemming on how Gorilla Tag became a VR phenomenon

Two minutes into talking to Gorilla Tag creator Kerestell Smith, I completely understood why his game became such a phenomenon. The virtual reality hangout game that invites you to “reject humanity, become a gorilla” hosts a million players every day on Quest and Steam. These are practically Counter-Strike 2 numbers; an unimaginably large audience for VR. Despite its modest (yet memorable) aesthetic and simplistic sandbox gameplay, the game celebrated 12 million players and $100 million in revenue over the summer. And he showed no signs of slowing down either.

Smith, known to his fans as Lemming, and his team at Another Axiom Inc. were able to crack the code and attract the massive audience every VR developer dreams of, and after meeting him at PAX West earlier this year, I quickly realized how he did it: he just will get what makes VR cool.

Axioms of a successful VR game

“Something we've been very careful about is that sense of authenticity,” he tells me as we duck into a dark corner of the esports lounge at Seattle's GameWorks. There's a meeting at the arcade for the game, and when I arrive I find Lemming surrounded by a hundred excited fans, all wearing banana hats. “You want to be able to put yourself into it because people will connect with it. When you put something in there that feels like, eh, maybe people will like it, I think people feel that too.”

Lemming was inspired to create Gorilla Tag after his professional career as a competitive Echo Arena player. He immediately connected with its zero gameplay and learned how visceral and immersive VR can be when done right.

“The game has 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 a wall and bounce off it and float away, and then see your feet floating in front of you, drifting backwards – when you're playing the game, that's the experience, which you have from top to bottom. It feels exactly like you imagine. The feeling is so intense. You just want to feel it more.”

That sense of authenticity is exactly what Gorilla Tag wanted to capture.

“If it's a disconnecting experience, then it's something where the next time you think 'Should I put on headphones?' You think maybe I'm not feeling it. But when the world is built to feel like you want to be in it, the pull is very strong,” he says.

For Gorilla Tag's 12 million players, this power is strong enough to overcome the common complaints and criticisms of VR. “A lot of the discussion around VR is that some parts can be a little uncomfortable, or you have to worry about being charged, if the headset is too tight, and maybe the visuals aren't perfect. I feel strongly that these are the things you notice if the experience isn't compelling enough.'

“If it's a disconnecting experience, then it's something where the next time you think 'Should I put on headphones?' You think maybe I'm not feeling it. But when the world is built to feel like you
want
be in it, the pull is very strong,”

While creating 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 a lot of physical limitations that clever developers are finding ways around. You can't move freely through space, you can't always interact with physical objects. When you use your gorilla arms to push the ground, which is how you move around the world in Gorilla Tag, you don't actually feel the ground under your furry palms. But Lemming manages to conjure up the illusion that the world around you is real regardless, and that's quite an achievement.

Echo Arena was a big inspiration for Gorilla Tag

Inspired by his experiences in the Echo Arena, Lemming discovered how to turn something potentially immersive into one of the game's biggest strengths.

“What's so great about hand motion is that if you push away with your hand, you get pushed back,” he says. “The relationship is suddenly not one-dimensional. I don't just beat around the bush. I'm pushing on the world and the world is pushing back on me, and that creates such a strong relationship with your environment.” Lemming believes the headset and visuals are only one part of what creates a visceral VR experience. “It's the part where you're able to communicate with your hands and feel the environment, that's what really places you in the world.”

Creating something that could only exist in VR and that takes advantage of the medium's greatest strengths was Lemming's inspiration and the source of Gorilla Tag's huge success. “I tried to pay real attention to it during the construction. You have to give players a reason to put on their headphones,” explains Lemming. “That feeling of wanting to be in the world, I think that's the key.

This physical connection is only one part of the immersion formula. Lemming explains that creating an internally consistent world that follows a set of rules that the player can intuitively sense and exist in without being bogged down or distracted by control schemes and menus is the other half of the equation. “I need to learn how to interact with this world, but once I do, I don't really have to stop believing,” he explains. “That suspension of disbelief comes from the things that violate this world. When something comes out of nowhere, or you hit a loading screen, or you teleport somewhere—all of those things take you out of the experience and remind you that you're playing a video game—if you remove all of those things as much as possible, now the experience is just, 'I'm in this other place'.”

Finally, Lemming's third axiom of immersion is the social aspect. He believes that true virtual reality requires a shared human experience where you can interact with other people in that environment. Sharing space is the most important thing. It's one thing to participate in a video call or Discord channel with others where there is an inherent distance between you that creates a subconscious disconnect. “But if you feel like you're in this real place and other people are there, it's great,” Lemming says. “There is nothing else like it. Using VR to connect with other people is what Lemming sees as the technology's greatest strength and most important use. “I don't see a way VR can fail in the long term,” he says. “This experience is so valuable on an interpersonal level. We need that special connection, and VR can provide that in a way that no other technology can.”

Focusing on these core principles makes Gorilla Tag one of the most successful VR games of all time. It's a real virtual reality space where people go to relax and socialize. It's exactly the kind of metaversion big tech dreams of, and yet this goofball gorilla game is what actually managed to crack the code. I asked Lemming why he thought this, and he told me it was largely a result of his inability to visualize the bigger picture.

“I think there are a lot of people who have these big big ideas, they have a vision for the future. I struggle with it a lot,” he explains. “I feel like what I've been able to do well is pay attention to the work that's been done and see what I find valuable about these different experiences and what I connect with. We approach things not from a “where are we trying to get to” perspective. It's just very clear thinking about what works right now. What are the experiences we associate with?? How do we want to expand these things?”

The studio brings the same values ​​to its next game, Orion Drift, a sci-fi VR game that leans even more heavily on the style and aesthetic of Echo Arena and increases the size of social lobbies to 200 players. Lemming compares the experience to being at a convention. “You're still going to focus on human interactions with small groups of people, but doing it in the context of this larger space adds something to it. You can play a 3v3 match and hear another match next to you. There is a sense of being part of something bigger.”

“I don't feel like we created something with Gorilla Tag, I feel like we found something that was incredibly valuable, and this is the kind of thing that if you build on, it's going to be successful because of how strongly people connect with it.”

With Orion Drift, the team hopes to create seamless social spaces where you can play a match and then walk around to watch another one, or meet different groups of people and naturally flow through different groups and social gatherings. “These are experiences you only get in real life that weren't available in games in the same way.”

Even with so much success, Lemming sees Gorilla Tag as just the foundation of what he believes VR will become. “You hear about movies like Casablanca or 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. That's the kind of thing I hope Gorilla Tag will be perceived as one day.”