clock menu more-arrow no yes mobile

Filed under:

Watch the stunning first trailer for the Rick and Morty VR game

The Job Simulator team is about to blow your plumbus clean off

The Rick and Morty Simulator: Virtual Rick-ality, a virtual reality game for the HTC Vive set in the world of Rick and Morty is real, playable at San Diego Comic Con and it's being made by the same team that brought us Job Simulator.

You can watch the trailer below.

"It’s actually the perfect overlap," Developer Owlchemy Labs' Alex Schwartz told Polygon. "The game takes place in Rick’s garage, and instantly you would associate all the things that are great about Job Simulator, all the near-field interactions ... Rick’s garage is filled with tons of stuff to play with. Chemistry sets and just boxes of things on the shelves. Elements from the show. It’s fully crammed in there."

While the game's teaser doesn't show much, and that's by design, Schwartz was able to discuss a few elements from the game that aren't immediately apparent. There's some neat technology making it all work.

"You will get to jump through portals in Rick and Morty Simulator, so that is super fucking cool to do," he said. "Our super-genius shader programmer guy on our team built a seamless world transition portal system, where as you walk towards it you can see inside the world and peek around inside it, and you basically walk right through it and there’s no seam and no pop. It’s fucking insane."

The combination of the Rick and Morty license and Owlchemy Labs development team seems like a wonderful match, and it happened organically. Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland is a VR enthusiast, and was a huge fan of Job Simulator. He invited the team over to his house to play games and hang out, and the idea of collaborating on the game seemed natural.

The work flow, according to Schwartz, has been fully collaborative. Owlchemy Labs writes the first draft of the dialog and even records scratch vocal performances to send over to Roiland. "I’ve gained a new respect for voice actors, after doing Rick’s voice for about four minutes my throat is so raw I can barely do any more Rick voice," Schwartz said.

Roiland listens to the vocals and then goes to work on the final cuts.

"We get like an hour-long, uncut Justin Roiland brain dump, and we sit around in tears laughing at his VO," Schwartz said. "It’s one of the funnest thing I’ve ever done, to hear how he explores the world and the situations we’ve built inside the game and just kind of goes deep on it. It’s super fun." It's not just a matter of re-recording the dialog; Roiland gives the team multiple takes, thoughts on the material and extensive ad-libs for use in the game.

The combination of the Rick and Morty license and Owlchemy Labs development team seems like a wonderful match

There's no set release date for the HTC Vive game, and the world of Rick and Morty offers plenty of room to experiment and explore. So how do you pick and choose what to include?

"We’re good at shipping games, that’s what I’ll say," Schwartz said. "We’ve always shipped our games on time, so scope management is something we’ve gotten good at in the past seven years of making games."

That being said, the developer has been given the ability to operate in an amazing playground. "The Rick and Morty world is an amazing world to be building in, because it almost has no canon," he continued. "You can do almost anything with almost any world item and it just works. It’s such an awesome world and we’ve been able to play with all aspects of it. It’s really cool."

Sign up for the newsletter Sign up for Patch Notes

A weekly roundup of the best things from Polygon