Spring of 2015. Dimly lit living room of a 2-bedroom apartment in Varissuo, Turku. A friend of mine was working in starting out a company of 5 guys creating a demo in the living room of one of the team members. Smell of old sweat and energy drinks in the air. I had heard that team needed some creative guy. I had taken some courses in scrip writing and film theory. Fit made in heaven, so I joined the team. And the rest is as they say, is history.

-Tero Alasmaa, Game Designer at Morrow Games

Today Morrow Games is a company of 10 individuals with the most colorful backgrounds. The team came together at a perfect moment for a couple of reasons. The first one being that Unreal Engine had just changed their business model, which allowed startup companies like us to use the best game engine on the market. The second reason was the rising boom around Virtual Reality. Unreal Engine gives developers great tools for creating and designing in virtual space.

What a time to be developing in VR. Dr. Kimberly Voll, a technical designer at Riot Games, said in her speech at GDC that 2016 will always be remembered as the year before the VR hit. We share our enthusiasm with Dr. Voll about the possibilities of VR.

Everything from first person shooters, simulations and Real Time Strategy games need to be thought over in VR. Think about flight simulators, where you can see every instrument in front of you, and you need to look over to see all the information that you need to play in real time. No user interface, just frantic action when you interact with switches and sliders in the cockpit trying to keep your craft in air. Think RTS, where you can walk around the battlefield; to see the action first hand. Then standing up to see the battle form bird eye view, and modify your strategy accordingly. Then switch your view to artillery station, command your troops to change angle of the cannon and give the fire command.

Immersion is the word with the VR. During the past decades, when the designers of the days past tried to pull the player in the world they created through the 2D screen in front of the player. Games like Mirror’s Edge are really good at doing this.

But there were still something missing. Even though players were able to see their characters hands and do the actions, players weren’t there. The suspense of disbelief still needed to be established.

This change of place happens so much easier in VR. Players get lost in the virtual worlds and forget the actual space they are playing in. So much so that players duck and jump to the side when a threat is coming right at them. Screaming for help when a monster gets too close. Shade their eyes from debris and the sun.

From these thoughts we get to the core of the video games and the media in general. What are we trying to give to our customers? Experiences. Every work of fiction through the years is created for one single purpose. To give our customer, the consumer, an experience of being someone else. To experience feelings and excitements normally unreachable. To be able to drive cars that only a handful of people in the world can afford. To fly a fighter craft in space. To be an all-powerful wizard, wielding the very powers of creation and destruction on your fingertips.

These are the possibilities of the written fiction, of the silver screen, of the video games. But this marvelous tech that is slowly coming to the homes of our consumers allows us to put the player in the middle of all this. To immerse, to experiment, to experience all that was previously only pixels on the screen; can be the working and beautiful world all around our player.

This is the dream we, as a team, wish to bring to life. This is what Morrow Games is.

‍