Cloudhead Games
| Cloudhead Games | |
|---|---|
| |
| Information | |
| Type | Private company |
| Industry | Video games, Virtual reality |
| Founded | 2013 |
| Founder | Denny Unger, Tracey Unger |
| Headquarters | Qualicum Beach, British Columbia, Canada |
| Notable Personnel | Denny Unger (CEO) |
| Products | The Gallery, Pistol Whip |
| Website | https://www.cloudheadgames.com |
Cloudhead Games is a Canadian Virtual Reality game studio based in Qualicum Beach, on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. It was founded by the married couple Denny and Tracey Unger and began work on virtual reality games before the first Oculus Rift development kit reached developers, which makes it one of the longest-running studios focused solely on VR.[1][2]
The studio is known for two titles: The Gallery, an episodic puzzle and exploration adventure that was a launch title for the HTC Vive in 2016, and Pistol Whip, an action-rhythm shooter released in 2019 that became one of VR's commercial successes. Cloudhead is also credited with early work on VR comfort and movement, including the teleport-style "Blink" locomotion and snap turning, techniques that were later adopted widely across VR games.[3][4]
History
Founding
Denny and Tracey Unger started Cloudhead Games on Vancouver Island, choosing Qualicum Beach because it was their home: a small community within driving distance of Vancouver's game industry but without the costs of a large city.[2] The studio describes its origins as a basement operation of a few game designers in Qualicum Beach. Denny Unger, the company's CEO, had a long background in VR going back to home-built experiments in the 1990s, and Tracey Unger came from a theatre production and management background.[2][5] The Ungers started the studio in their Qualicum Beach garage in 2013, spent time in the town's Digital Arts Studio and a larger space in nearby Coombs, and later became the anchor tenant of a roughly 8,000 square foot building in the centre of town that had once been the local firehall.[6] Cloudhead celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2023.[3]
The Gallery
In 2013 Cloudhead ran a Kickstarter campaign for The Gallery, which it billed as one of the first commercially announced games made specifically for virtual reality. The campaign, run in the spring of 2013, drew 1,568 backers who pledged about 83,000 US dollars.[7][2] The studio gained early access to HTC Vive development hardware through its relationship with Valve and HTC.[1]
The first installment, The Gallery - Episode 1: Call of the Starseed, was released on April 5, 2016 as a launch title for the HTC Vive, and a version for the Oculus Rift with Touch controllers followed on December 6, 2016. The game was built in Unity and scored 79 out of 100 on Metacritic; TIME listed it among its best HTC Vive launch games.[7][8] The second installment, The Gallery - Episode 2: Heart of the Emberstone, was released on October 18, 2017 for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift and scored 86 out of 100 on Metacritic.[7] Across its first two episodes the series won more than twenty awards and nominations, including recognition for technology and innovation, and the studio has said it was among the first VR developers to pass one million US dollars in sales.[2] Cloudhead has said that a third episode would depend on substantial growth in the VR market, and as of late 2020 no third episode was in active development.[7]
Locomotion and comfort work
While building The Gallery, Cloudhead developed techniques to reduce motion discomfort in room-scale VR. The studio created a teleport-based movement system it called "Blink," which moves the player between points without continuous artificial locomotion, reducing the visual motion (vection) that can cause discomfort. It also worked on snap turning, in which the view rotates in fixed increments rather than smoothly. Both Teleportation and snap turning became common comfort options in later VR games.[4][3] Cloudhead has described Blink as the default locomotion in The Gallery, dating its teleport work to around 2015, and lists hand interaction, object constraint, and body persistence among its other early systems.[4]
Pistol Whip
Cloudhead began work on Pistol Whip in 2018, after VR sales had been modest, and aimed the project at the emerging standalone Quest market.[1] Pistol Whip is an action-rhythm first-person shooter in which the player advances automatically through a stage and shoots enemies in time with the music, with movie-poster style scenes selected from a hub and difficulty modifiers that change scoring.[9] It was released on November 7, 2019 for the Oculus Quest and Windows PC VR, came to PlayStation VR in 2020, and launched as a day-one title for PlayStation VR2 on February 22, 2023 with added haptic feedback.[9][10]
The game received strong reviews: UploadVR rated it 5 out of 5, while Edge, IGN, and Road to VR each gave it 8 out of 10, and on Metacritic the PlayStation 4 version scored 88 and the PC version 83.[9] Pistol Whip won the award for Immersive Reality Game of the Year at the 23rd D.I.C.E. Awards and was nominated for Immersive Reality Technical Achievement.[9] Commercially it far outsold the studio's earlier work; Cloudhead reported that December 2020 sales were about 60 percent higher than December 2019 and that its user base grew 131 percent from 2019 to 2020, which Denny Unger said made the studio profitable enough to plan years ahead.[1] By 2023 the studio said the game had passed one million players.[3]
Cloudhead supported Pistol Whip for years after release with free content. It added themed scene collections through a series of seasons, including the "Elixir of Madness" electro-swing collection in late 2023, and shipped a level-editor tool called Pistol Mix that lets players build their own scenes.[11][3] As of 2026 Pistol Whip is available on Quest, PC VR, Pico 4, and PlayStation VR2.[11]
Current status
Cloudhead Games remains an independently funded studio based in Qualicum Beach, without outside venture capital backing, and Denny Unger continues as CEO.[1][3] In 2023 the studio said it had begun a new VR project that draws on its decade of VR development, while continuing to release content for Pistol Whip, though it did not announce a title or release window.[11][3]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 "For Veteran Cloudhead Games, VR Has Become a Lucrative Business". January 26, 2021. https://www.roadtovr.com/vr-lucrative-business-cloudhead-interview/.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 "Vancouver Island Business Success Stories: Cloudhead Games". https://mibi.ca/success-story/cloudhead-games/.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 "Celebrating 10 Years of Cloudhead Games With New Pistol Whip Reveals!". August 8, 2023. https://www.cloudheadgames.com/post/celebrating-10-years-of-cloudhead-games-with-new-pistol-whip-reveals.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 "Studio". https://www.cloudheadgames.com/innovation.
- ↑ "Featured Member: Cloudhead Games". September 24, 2020. https://digibc.org/2020/09/24/featured-member-cloudhead-games/.
- ↑ "Cloudhead to occupy old fire hall in Qualicum Beach". https://www.pqbnews.com/news/cloudhead-to-occupy-old-fire-hall-in-qualicum-beach/.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 "The Gallery (video game)". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gallery_(video_game).
- ↑ "The Gallery: Call of the Starseed Comes to Oculus Touch On Dec. 6th". November 2016. https://uploadvr.com/gallery-call-starseed-oculus-touch/.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 "Pistol Whip". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pistol_Whip.
- ↑ "A look at Pistol Whip's PlayStation VR2 haptics upgrade, out Feb 22". February 3, 2023. https://blog.playstation.com/2023/02/03/a-look-at-pistol-whips-playstation-vr2-haptics-upgrade-out-feb-22/.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 "New Pistol Whip Roadmap Revealed As Cloudhead Begins Next VR Project". August 8, 2023. https://www.uploadvr.com/pistol-whip-early-2024-roadmap/.