Virtual reality game industry in ‘Wild West’

Some not convinced that VR devices will become mainstream.

Phil Fish, an independent video game developer who made the hit game “Fez,” quit the business in 2014 after burning out and becoming fed up with the gaming industry ’s sometimes corrosive culture.

Now he’s back, lured by the promise of a long-anticipated technology: virtual reality.

“I’ve been dreaming about this since I was 10 years old,” Fish, 31, said from his office in Austin, Texas. “I just got really excited about the realization of the dream of VR.”

Fish is part of a four-person collective called Kokoromi that i s poised to release a vir tual realit y game called Superhypercube.

The object of the Tetris-like puzzle game, set in a red-tinged world of incandescent tubes and gleaming neon, is to rotate a cluster of blocks so that they fit perfectly through the corresponding hole in a rapidly approaching wall.

All the while, players are suffused in 360 degrees of shimmering colors and must physically lean to peer around the blocks and align them in the 3-D space.

Fish’s enthusiasm for virtual reality is being echoed by others in the video game business — in some cases pushing retired game developers to return and inspiring others with its creative potential — even as many hurdles remain to virtual reality’s entry into the mainstream.

What makes virtual reality so potent is not only how it envelops players in a 360-degree visual experience, but also how it uses 3-D lenses, immersive audio and head-tracking technology to create a profound sense of physical presence that developers are just beginning to explore.

“We always wanted to build p l a c e s a n d wo r l d s , n o t j u s t games, and VR just does that. It makes you feel like you’re in another place without even trying,” said Rand Miller, a co-designer of “Myst” and the designer of “Obduction.”

Some critics remain unconvinced that virtual reality devices will become mainstream consumer products, given the cost, the potential to induce nausea in some people and the sky-high expectations for the technology.

T h i s month, Appl e ’s c h i e f executive, Tim Cook, said he believed that augmented reality — in which the digital world is overlaid on the physical one — had more consumer appeal than virtual reality.

That does not faze Fish, who started making video games in 2005 with the games developer Ubisoft.

Although virtual reality’s commerc i a l f u t u r e i s u n c e r t a i n , Kokoromi remains more interested in the creative possibilities.

Pl ay S t a t i o n VR “c o ul d s e l l 100,000 units or it could sell 10 million units; we don’t know,” Fish said. “But it’s superexciting. It’s the Wild West right now. Everything’s a discovery, everything has to be reinvented and reconsidered.”