The terrifying world of The Walking Dead will be coming to a VR headset near you thanks to a new partnership between Robert Kirkman and David Alpert's Skybound Entertainment and David Ellison's Skydance Interactive.

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During E3 2017, the two companies announced a new partnership to develop multiple original virtual reality titles set within the universe of The Walking Dead. The inaugural title developed through this partnership will be a Walking Dead VR game featuring a new setting and cast of characters, "which players will experience through an innovative contextual interaction system."The Walking Dead continues to dominate the pop culture space with the success of Kirkman and Charlie Adlard's comics and the AMC drama remains the top-rated show on TV. The companion series, Fear the Walking Dead, recently returned for its third season , while The Walking Dead Telltale Games helped carve out a new subgenre of video games with their ongoing, episodic storytelling. So it only makes sense that Skybound would look to expand the zombie-filled world to virtual reality.The focus of the VR game will be an immersive narrative storytelling experience that forces players to make the same complex moral choices faced with characters in other Walking Dead stories versus making a straight up horror VR game. That choice and discovery matrix, along with the interaction implications those player decisions will have, will create the framework of this new title. No target release date for The Walking Dead VR title has been set. It's being developed in Unreal Engine, and will be released on platforms including PSVR, HTC Vive and Oculus."The Walking Dead, it all comes back to moral choice and what would you do as the player. That's sort of the essential principal pillar of the IP. I think that's what people who either read the comic, watch the show, play the games," added Skybound President of Interactive Dan Murray during an interview with IGN. "What better way to experience that than being in the environment itself?"Skydance President of Interactive Peter Akemann promises that the presence of digital actors in this virtual environment will be more powerful -- "categorically different, categorically immersive" -- than encountering characters in a conventional video game experience.As story is still being developed for the Walking Dead VR game, Murray was unable to reveal where exactly this story fits within the larger world of The Walking Dead, and whether it will be completely separate (like Fear the Walking Dead) or tangentially connected to the TV series and comics (like the Telltale games)."There will be some surprises. We haven't decided that. We can't speak too much to what the storyline might be, but there will be a new story. We will be introducing new characters and a new storyline," said Murray. "Beyond that, that's something that we will be able to reveal as we dig deeper into development."This won't be the first time Skybound has ventured into the realm of virtual reality. The company produced the first-ever narrative VR series, Gone, for Samsung’s Milk VR platform, and has both the forthcoming horror VR series Delusion: Lies Within and the original VR game called Giant Cop on the horizon. Skydance Interactive, a division of Ellison's production company Skydance Media, has also been pushing into the VR space since it launched in 2016. The company's first foray into VR is the upcoming original game Archangel, and according to Akemann, this partnership with Skybound is in line with the company's mission."We've gone at this from the beginning as VR is ready for big ticket commercial efforts, for serious investments in full bore game product that embraced going beyond the sort of tech demos and experiences that purvey the VR space, to something that tells rich story, that gives a rich, complete experience to the player," said Akemann. "We wanted to make sure that our next effort [The Walking Dead] really took that to the nines."Joked Murray: "People often come to me and ask, 'Skydance, Skybound -- it's like they're so close together.' That confusion in our names? We decided, screw it, let's just work together and solve that from the get-go."This new untitled game will be the first of several Walking Dead VR games that Skybound and Skydance are developing. "We want to basically treat VR as a big platform endeavor for us to tell new stories in. The goal here is to build on top of that, and Walking Dead will be the first of many," said Murray.Akemann is leaving the door open to a variety of concepts for ways to differentiate future games from the first one the companies will release. "It gives us a chance to pioneer -- to leverage their strengths and ours -- to produce something spectacular," he said of the Skybound and Skydance partnership. Akemann considers a game that is successful in VR will have a very different experience than other Walking Dead games, "even if it echoes the same sort of hive-minded narrative goals.""[There are] lots of places you can take it," he said. "In some ways, VR is going to be its own beast. The medium itself is going to compel us to create content that's not going to be like anything you've seen before. I think this will be the first of many things as we lay down the basic vocabulary of what's possible with this first title."

Terri Schwartz is Editorial Producer at IGN. Talk to her on Twitter at @Terri_Schwartz