SEATTLE—"How much of this am I allowed to spoil?" This was my first question to Justin Roiland—the writer, animator, and voice actor best known for co-creating Adult Swim series Rick & Morty—after 12 minutes of laughing hysterically inside of his first virtual reality project.

Roiland topped off his makeshift morning mimosa and responded pretty demurely, choosing not to offer a PR-style list of rules and restrictions. Instead, his plea sounded like one from a creator, not an advertiser: whatever gets spoiled will ruin the whole point of his first-ever, fully fledged VR product, so, you know, be cool about it.

Here's what I can say thus far: it's a "game" called Accounting. In it, your VR hands look like giant Windows mouse pointers. It's actually about accounting. (And a little more.) It's free for the HTC Vive, and it will launch "really soon" as the first game from Roiland's new, dedicated VR studio, the bizarrely named Squanchtendo.

"That's one of the benefits of having the game be complimentary," Roiland said to Ars. "If we're selling this, now we have to show a little too much. It's like, 'Why am I paying $3 for...?' It's so much better if it's, you know, 'It's Accounting in VR? It's free, whatever, I'll try it. The people behind it, I like what they've done.'

"Then they get that weird Alice in Wonderland, down-the-rabbit-hole insanity," he added.

Not just Virtual Rick-ality

















Our hotel-room meeting turned out even weirder than I expected—and I had already assumed it would be odd, since this is, after all, the man whose hit cartoon is dominated by hundreds of phallic, bulbous, and pus-dripping aliens. Roiland made a joke about a hypodermic needle surprise-stabbing me in the first few minutes of the interview. The chat included one of Accounting's main developers, William "The Stanley Parable" Pugh, set up as a Skype monitor at the head of a dummy body. When Pugh wasn't being asked questions, he did his best to distract the other people in the room by doing weird things in his London flat, including holding up what appeared to be a variety of drugs.

To be fair, their reputation had preceded them. You may have heard Roiland publicly joke about making an "accounting simulator in VR." Shortly after that tease, Pugh posted a brief snippet of "Accounting for the Vive" to add fuel to the fire that this joke had some meat to it.

Pugh and Roiland clearly had fun screwing with interviewers in March by saying things like, "in the early stages of VR, there's going to be a real need for these people who have to sit at a desk and look at excel spreadsheets." Knowing their track records, you could have already guessed that they were lying through their teeth. Revealing exactly how they lied, however, would spoil most of the glory that is Accounting.

All I knew when I took a PAX West appointment with Roiland and his Squanchtendo co-founder, former Epic Games producer Tanya Watson, was that I could expect "a brand-new game"—meaning, not the other major Roiland-affiliated VR experience that had already been announced, Rick & Morty's Virtual Rick-ality. That project is being made almost entirely by Owlchemy Labs, the creators of the HTC Vive hit Job Simulator ("those guys are fucking amazing," Roiland shouts as soon as I bring them up), and published by Adult Swim Games.

Roiland explained that Owlchemy is handling that VR game's production and design, while he is contributing higher-level design calls and "retroscripted" dialogue—meaning, he'll find out what players need to hear in the game, then improvise and riff in a recording booth. That game's preliminary demo, which I also tested at PAX, resembles Job Simulator in terms of asking players to do silly things with their virtual hands while funny stuff happens around them—only with the entire Rick & Morty universe coming into play, so players will go to the show's locations and meet familiar characters.

Accounting isn't like that. It has zero ties to the cartoon hit either officially, informally, or staffing-wise, and the same goes for any of the first wave of projects from Roiland and Watson's company. (Roiland admits that could change in the future, but Roiland says no plans have been brought up with R&M's staff thus far.) The duo has only hired a full-time artist so far but is looking to staff up to make in-house games of its own as an entity entirely distinct from Rick & Morty or any other work on Roiland's plate.

"Rick & Morty is a full-time job," Roiland said. "Nights and weekends used to be me on Reddit, watching Bachelor in Paradise, or building LEGO sets while listening to the old Joystiq podcast. Now it's VR, VR, VR."

As in, Roiland has been filling up notebooks on and off over the past year-plus with ideas for gameplay mechanics, narrative hooks, and other elements he would like to see in a VR experience. He credits Valve Software, in part, with which he connected in 2015 to record Rick & Morty-specific dialogue for a special add-on "announcer" pack in the Valve game Dota 2. Roiland had already proven himself a VR fanboy by buying the first two Oculus developer kits, and he still gushes about that hardware and its first wave of retail games, including Chronos and Lucky's Tale.

"But when I tried the Vive, something in my brain changed," Roiland admitted.

“I’m a pathological liar”

From then on, Roiland became a proselytizer for the Vive, and he claimed that he "got a bunch of other people [Vive development] kits who are [now] developing their own games." In that process, Roiland tried to figure out how to get involved with actually making games, but since he has zero programming experience, he instead began by recording dialogue for early Vive hits such as Hover Junkers and Job Simulator.

His first major transition from writing in notebooks to making games came when Pugh cold-called Roiland over Twitter, pretending to be someone else. "We initially met because he was looking [on Twitter] for a tour of Respawn Entertainment," Pugh said to Ars over Skype, referring to the studio responsible for the Titanfall series. "I'm a pathological liar, so I said, 'I'm from Respawn, follow me!' He wrote me a little later and said, "I'm in your building, where can we meet?" Ten tweets later, we started talking about a collaboration."

Before long, Pugh and other developers at his indie studio, Crows Crows Crows, flew to Burbank, California, to work with Roiland on a four-day VR game jam. Accounting was the result.

"I'm glad I got to Justin before some triple-A studio," Pugh said—and this is when the duo began finishing each other's sentences about a frantic, small-team design process. Roiland said it reminded him of his early, low-budget cartoon-creating days, when he and some friends worked up bizarre cartoons like House of Cosbys. Roiland found himself more comfortable working on game design than he expected, and he began seeking someone to help him realize his dream of actually opening and launching a dedicated game studio.

Watson met Roiland in a very Hollywood way, she admits, as Roiland's agent also represents Cliff Blezsinski, her former coworker at Epic Games. Watson already had her own dream about dipping her toes into an independent studio with a VR focus, as she had tired of the game-design process at bigger studios. She admitted she was "kind of skeptical" when she first talked to Roiland about his idea for Squanchtendo, but what he'd pulled off with that four-day game jam blew her away. "We need to put this out," she told him after they began formally putting studio plans together.

What else can we expect? Roiland and Watson aren't opening up their design notebooks or talking up future projects just yet. All they have to their name is one other full-time staffer hired thus far and this single, wholly complimentary game coming soon—which, to be fair, was largely produced by the outside team at Crows Crows Crows. But Roiland is bullish on what we should expect, and while the content of Accounting (whose release date will be announced at its official site soon) should be a good indication, its brevity should not.

"This will set the tone for Squanchtendo," Roiland said. "It's an opportunity to get eyes on an experience that's like the stuff we intend to make in the future. We'll have much tighter narratives in the bigger games we're developing, but I absolutely love the loose, improvised performances here. Really, I'm very eager for the first big ten-hour game in VR."

Listing image by Sam Machkovech