Dead and Buried

Dead and Buried
Information
VR/AR	Virtual Reality
Developer	Oculus Studios, Gunfire Games
Publisher	Oculus Studios
Platform	Oculus Rift (Platform), Gear VR
Device	Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR, Oculus Go
Type	Game
Genre	Shooter, Action
Input Device	Oculus Touch, Gear VR Controller
Game Mode	Single-player, Multiplayer, Co-op
Release Date	December 6, 2016
Price	Free with Oculus Touch
App Store	Oculus Store

See also: VR Apps and VR Games

Dead and Buried (also styled Dead & Buried) is a Wild West themed virtual reality first-person shooter made by Oculus Studios, the in-house game studio of Oculus VR, for the Oculus Rift with Oculus Touch motion controllers. Gunfire Games worked on the game as a co-developer. It was released on 6 December 2016, the same day as Oculus Touch, and was given free to every Touch owner.

Players hold revolvers, rifles, shotguns and dynamite in their own hands and duck and lean behind physical cover inside the tracked play space; the game has no artificial locomotion. It offered competitive team shootouts, a train robbery mode, a four-player co-op horde mode and single-player target practice. Versions for the Gear VR Controller on Samsung Gear VR and for Oculus Go followed. Oculus Studios later made a sequel, Dead and Buried II (2019). Meta Platforms removed both games from sale in September 2023 and ended support for them on 15 March 2024.

Reviewed 11 October 2026. Developer and Gunfire Games role, Touch bundle and 6 December 2016 release, OC2/GDC 2016/OC3/OC5 showings, game modes, weapons and reload mechanics, Gear VR and Oculus Go versions, Summer of Bullets update, UploadVR review quotes, sequel and 2023-2024 shutdown, against all cited sources. About review dates.

Gameplay

The store listing describes the game as "built from the ground up for Rift and Touch". It lists competitive online shootouts in a saloon, a train depot and other locations; four-player cooperative play against waves of creatures; single-player target ranges with high scores; ducking and leaning to take cover; and weapons including six-shooters, dynamite and rifles.

Weapons are picked up with the Touch controller's hand trigger. The revolver is the default weapon and is always holstered on each hip. To reload it, the player flicks the gun sideways so the chamber swings out, spins and refills, then flicks it back. Other weapons found around a map, such as a burst-fire rifle, a double-barrel shotgun and a grenade launcher, are reloaded with a downward and then upward flick instead. In a 2016 interview, designer Ryan Rutherford named a two-shot shotgun called "The Punisher" and a large weapon with one giant shell called the "One Shot", which he described as "basically a grenade launcher". He said the team designed weapons to get players back out of cover after noticing that many of them were able to get behind cover and hide.

There is no stick or teleport movement. Players spawn at predetermined points and move only within the real tracking volume, kneeling, ducking and leaning to stay out of enemy fire; after a death the player respawns at a different point with different cover. Laser sights help with aiming.

Modes

UploadVR's review described five modes at launch:

Mode	Description
Shooting gallery	Single-player target practice
Shootout	Team-based firefight between players
Robbery	Objective mode for two teams of two, outlaws against lawmen, on a linear map
Quick Draw	A reflex duel started by a countdown
Horde	Wave-based co-op for up to four players, with a large supernatural boss on each map

In Robbery, one team tries to rob a train and the other tries to stop it. The safe is in the caboose, and the fight moves through sleeper cars and box cars and onto the roof; the winning team advances and the losing team falls back. UploadVR's October 2016 preview called this mode "Heist" and reported that its last stage required cracking a dial combination lock. The same preview described Horde as four players defending cover points against zombies, suicide bombers and snipers, ending in a boss fight with a witch. Players choose from four avatars, which can be customized with new cosmetic options as they gain experience.

Development

According to Rutherford, the project began as a Gear VR and Rift game played with a gamepad or the Gear VR touchpad, built around a one-on-one street duel. "Then Touch came along and it was just a natural fit," he told Road to VR. In an Oculus blog interview he said the core team was originally two people: Andrew Welch, lead engineer and technical director, and Rutherford himself, who handled design and environment art. The team found the one-on-one duel concept shallow, rebuilt the game around Touch, and later collaborated with Gunfire Games "to assist in creating a game larger than ourselves". UploadVR reported in March 2016 that the game was "the first Oculus Rift game to be fully developed by the company's in house production team, Oculus Studios", and that, according to Welch, its art was designed by comic book artist Jeff Masuda.

The game was first shown at Oculus Connect 2 in September 2015 as a target-shooting demo set against an old west mining operation, in which the ghost of an old miner holds out two revolvers for the player to take; targets appeared in rounds of increasing difficulty. At Oculus' Game Days event during GDC 2016 it was shown with 2v2 multiplayer in a saloon map. UploadVR's account of that demo described a first-to-25-kills team deathmatch and reported, citing Welch, that the game would be a launch title for Touch, then expected in the second quarter of 2016. Touch eventually launched on 6 December 2016.

By October 2016 the game had gained its four-player co-op mode, which Road to VR played at Oculus Connect 3, and the train robbery mode. UploadVR reported that the game was "Developed in-house by Oculus Studios" and that Horde was co-developed with Gunfire Games. Gunfire Games lists the game among its own releases, stating that it "teamed up with Oculus again and released Dead and Buried". A 2018 Road to VR report referred to Gunfire Games as the "Dead and Buried developers".

Release

Oculus announced on 31 October 2016 that Dead and Buried would be free for Touch owners at the Touch launch on 6 December. Road to VR reported that it would be bundled with every Touch purchase, not only pre-orders, alongside VR Sports Challenge and The Unspoken, which were pre-order bonuses. UploadVR observed that most new systems launch with one free high-end title, while Touch was getting three. The Rift store listing gives the price as "Free with Oculus Touch Activation!"

In March 2017 Oculus demonstrated a Samsung Gear VR port at a press event in San Francisco. It was adapted for the new Gear VR motion controller and lacked positional tracking, and the demo was limited to a multiplayer "shootout" mode in which two players faced each other and drew when a bell sounded. By August 2017 Oculus was promoting a Gear VR Controller version of the game. At Oculus Connect 4 in October 2017 the game was named among the first titles confirmed for Oculus Go. The original game never came to Oculus Quest.

Platform	Date	Notes
Oculus Rift (Oculus Store)	6 December 2016	Requires Oculus Touch; free with Touch
Samsung Gear VR	2017	Gear VR Controller version; available by August 2017
Oculus Go	Date not confirmed	Adapted version for the 3DoF standalone headset

Updates

The "Summer of Bullets" update of 7 August 2017 added in-game 360-degree screenshot and video capture with a viewing gallery, mixed reality capture support, a new level called Purgatory, Shootout matches that could start with three players, a Global Quick Search for joining open multiplayer games, and matchmaking and menu improvements.

Reception

Before release, Road to VR's Ben Lang wrote after the GDC 2016 demo that the 2v2 multiplayer made the game "one of the most enjoyable VR experiences I've played yet", comparing it to first playing Halo: Combat Evolved multiplayer, and said thoughts of "killer app material" lingered. Road to VR's report on the Touch bundle described the unreleased game as "widely acclaimed".

Joe Durbin of UploadVR summed up his review with "In short: this game is fun", and called it "one of the most physical VR games we've ever played". He singled out Horde, Shootout and Robbery as the strongest modes. His criticisms were that fixed spawn points could decide one-on-one fights by luck, that Quick Draw was shallow, that the cosmetic progression gave little incentive, and that "the absence of some sort of teleport mechanic hurts the game overall". He also questioned whether enough Rift owners with Touch would keep matches populated.

Sequel and arena demo

At Oculus Connect 5 in September 2018, Oculus showed a multiplayer arena version of Dead and Buried running on the then upcoming Oculus Quest. Two teams of three played in a space of about 4,000 square feet, using physical boxes as cover around a virtual old west train station, without a backpack or external tracking hardware. Road to VR reported that this prototype was developed in-house at Oculus Studios rather than by Gunfire Games.

Dead and Buried II was released in May 2019 as a launch title for the original Oculus Quest and also on Rift, with cross-play between the two. Unlike the first game, it added stick-driven locomotion. Its free "Reloaded" update of April 2020 brought back the original game's Quickdraw and Horde modes.

Shutdown

In September 2023 Meta emailed owners that Dead and Buried, Dead and Buried II and the virtual pet game Bogo would no longer be supported from 15 March 2024. The games were removed from store search, and they could no longer be bought or downloaded by anyone who did not already have them in their library. Road to VR described the two online-focused Dead and Buried games as "more understandable victims of platform decay", in contrast to the single-player Bogo.