This led to the formation of what he calls the Three Axioms for his studio, Another Axiom. Smith explained this conceptual trio as the direct relationship between the player and the environment, building a plausible alternate reality with consistent internal rules that players can understand, and forming a connection to other people in-game. These axioms, Smith suggested, will also help shape the team’s next project, Orion Drift, which looks to build on Gorilla Tag’s social structure with massively expanded multiplayer worlds. Still, we’ve seen apps find success on App Lab, and none more so than Gorilla Tag, a simple game of multiplayer tag with unique hand-based locomotion and charmingly low-fi visuals, which has succeeded in finding an audience despite not being visible in the main Quest store. The game has seen a surge in popularity in the last few weeks, with a Steam news update from the game’s sole developer pegging the player base at over 40,000 people.
Gorilla Tag is a 2022 virtual reality social casual game1 developed and released by Another Axiom. The game involves controlling legless gorilla-like a beginners guide to bitcoin 2020 creatures through hand movements to interact with others online casually or in matches with tag-like mechanics. Originally developed by Kerestell “Lemming” Smith, Gorilla Tag was made available in early access on SteamVR and Meta Quest in 2021. It was officially launched on Quest in December 2022, on Steam in January 2023, and on PlayStation VR2 in November 2024. The game was popularized through social media and, by June 2024, received 10 million total players and crossed $100 million in revenue. If you don’t have kids, it’s quite possible you’ve never heard of Gorilla Tag, and if you do have kids, there’s a good chance Gorilla Tag is all you’ve been hearing about for a few years now.
It’s got hints of Echo VR’s locomotion system, but unlike Echo, you’ll be working with full gravity and very little sustainable grip. It’s all about propelling yourself forward the minute you touch a surface. If you try and hang onto a surface instead of using it to push forward, you’ll plummet to the ground. In concept it’s almost identical to how actual gorillas move around using their arms. However, in Gorilla Tag, all the gorillas are cut off from the waist down, with no legs.
As headsets get less bulky and more powerful–and these kids eventually have expendable income–it does seem like there is still a future for this tech that many wrote off years ago. Gorilla Tag is a multiplayer virtual reality game developed and published by Another Axiom LLC. Development first began in January 2020 and the game was finally released the following year on Steam on February 12, 2021, during its early access phase.
That’s a huge part of getting good and learning how to play Gorilla Tag, slapping the ground or walls in just the right way that it moves you just how you want to move. See those arrows in the center that point from one of those walls to the other? You need to make your way up the straight walls to reach the top of the cliff. You have to reach the top of that cliff, and you have two options. You can just go up the ramp if you’re in a hurry and just want to play the game already. Follow them to proceed, and soon you’ll see a bump in the floor.
Plant one hand on the ground and then the other in front of you while you swing. The feeling of being a monkey bouncing and flying around in VR is so satisfying when you learn how to do it, and believe it or not part of the top 11 data mining techniques of 2022 fun is learning how to move around well. Smith added that his confidence in VR is backed by two specific reasons. One is because of that aforementioned foundation that he feels VR now benefits from; it’s found its footing, and from there, it can only improve. The second, which he returned to more often and fervently than any other in my 70-minute chat with him, is VR’s unique social dynamics.
It’s free to play with two maps and two game modes — one is basic tag with up to 3 players, the other is infection tag with 4 or more. “If you have this really strong connection with your environment, if you push on the world, and the world pushes back, if it’s built in a way that feels real, has this subset of rules, internally consistent rules that the game follows, that you can learn and then just be immersed in the space, because you understand it, and then you put other people there, so you feel like you’re there, and you feel like other people are there,” Smith said. “That kind of connection you can have is second only to what you can form in real life. “But VR allows people to create these communities and spaces that they can just exist in and just hang out together. One of the things that I want people to feel about the games that we make is not like, ‘Gorilla Tag is really fun.’ It’s the feeling of being in that world with other people. It’s the same way that you can picture what it’s like to just hang out with your friends, or go and spend time at their house, or go visit the beach and just, you know, soak up the waves.” In it, players inhabit the bodies of gorillas and join a multiplayer world with others where they–you guessed it–play tag.
It doesn’t even have to look like real life, Smith said, recalling the platform’s early obsession with high-fidelity visuals. Targeting the original and underpowered Oculus Quest headset, Smith knew he would need to work within his limitations for Gorilla Tag, and he told me he was inspired by a YouTube channel called Alpha Beta Gamer that’s dedicated to playing under-the-radar indie games, many of which featured PS1-style visuals. With years of success behind him and his team’s next game coming soon, Smith acknowledges a VR bubble but feels it’s only a matter of time until it pops. “The way I think about it is, you know when we were really young and our parents were telling us, ‘I don’t get why you kids are playing these games,’ right? And we’re like, ‘You just don’t understand.’ It was kind of generational, right? It’s not because they wouldn’t be able to have fun playing games, but they just didn’t even think of themselves as people who would play these games.
That’s easy enough and by this point you already have the skills to do that on your own, but if you want to challenge yourself and make sure you’re ready to explore Gorilla Tag’s fun maps, then you can try the hard way. The joysticks on your controllers won’t do anything, and that’s the secret behind what makes Gorilla crypto trading journal Tag so much fun. You don’t use joysticks to slide in the direction you want to move. You’ll notice that there aren’t any popups or anything telling you what to do, and you’re in a sort of dark cave.
Once you’re there you can see all of the apps that you have installed. You’ve probably heard about how great this game is, and I can say from all of the fun times I’ve had in this game that there isn’t anything quite like it in Virtual Reality or anywhere else. Gorilla Tag is available for free on Steam for PC VR and via SideQuest for sideloading onto Oculus Quest, with cross-platform play supported. It was clear, when Smith finally took a breath, that he firmly believes in VR, not just as a current tech toy or a development tool for his sudden change of career, but as a platform with a foundation already sturdy enough today that he no longer worries about its future prospects. Well here are just a few of the many free enjoyable singleplayer campaigns for the F/A-26B.
Due to the playground-like nature of the world, however, players have branched out to make their own games, foster urban legends about the world, and use it as an online hangout space where the loose structure lets them join up and chat. Smith even told me his team holds meetings inside the game. Because of several factors–its novel gameplay intentions, its low-poly (and now heavily memed) art style, its immense popularity despite being trapped in a VR bubble–Gorilla Tag has fascinated me for years, so I asked Smith to give me the game’s origin story. What I didn’t expect was a nearly 40-minute answer that ate up most of our initially allotted interview time. But his lengthy answer was illuminating, and we were able to stick around long after the scheduled end point so I could get in another dozen or so questions I still wanted to ask.
It then expanded its availability to App Lab the subsequent month, ultimately reaching its official launch on the Meta Store on December 15, 2022. There’s voice chat enabled by default, so players will often by chatting to each other mid-game or communicating with each other to find the last un-tagged gorillas. As a whole, the game is as simple as it gets but its a solid foundation to build on. The developer states on the Steam page that they intend on adding more content and fleshing the game out as they go along, while also maintaining a free-to-play model with potential for cosmetic DLC down the line.
Oh, and while you do this make sure you’ve got enough space to play the game. Visually, the game is a bit garish and polygonal, but it doesn’t matter because it’s all about the movement system. Moving in Gorilla Tag is very simple in concept, but has a high skill ceiling — as the description on Steam reads, “no buttons, no sticks, no teleportation.” This is all about channelling your inner monkey and using your arms to grip surfaces and propel yourself forward. As he grinded to the top of the Echo Arena competitive leaderboards, Smith discovered that the game’s zero-G movement was so much like what he imagined the real thing to feel like that he became obsessed with ideas of virtual worlds that abide by their own internal logic, and do so consistently to the extent that they can immerse you in an experience unlike any other. To do that you need to jump up to one wall, and then push yourself off of it to the other. When you’re still in the air you push yourself off of that wall, and back and forth until you reach the top.
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