I had a friend in middle school, one of those friends that fell into the “someone you see on the bus” and “sometimes go to their house” categories.  The kind of friend that you would happily play bloody knuckles with in the back of the bus, but if you passed each other in the halls, you’d probably just nod and be on your way.  Pre-teen friendships were strange like that.

On those many bus rides home, my friend would, every so often, pull a collection of floppy disks out of his backpack and declare “you’ve got to check this out.”  And whenever he did, I’d be sure to take those floppies home straight away and see what wonderful surprise they held.  My friend had earned that trust; it was through him that I first discovered Wasteland and Sim City, so his track record was golden in my eyes.

And so it was, one day in 1992, that I stepped off the bus with a 3.5″ disk in my hand simply labeled “Virtual Reality Studio.”  I installed the program on my system with no idea what to expect, and what I got was something that I never saw coming.

For those of you unfamiliar with the title (which is probably most of you), Virtual Reality Studio was released in 1991 by Domark.  VRS was actually its North American name, having come out in Europe as 3d Construction Kit a year earlier.  The basic premise is simple: using the Freescape engine (featured in Driller and Castle Master), the user is given a blank space in which they can create a 3d world of their liking using simple primitive shapes.  Cubes, lines, rectangles: these are the building blocks from which a world can be born.

Once you finished building your world, you could run it as a stand-alone program. A player, once they entered your world, could move about in 3d space via either walking or flying (depending on what you set), and their main method of interacting with the world was through either activating items or through shooting them (via laser).  Of course, as exciting as it was to build a little virtual world and run around in it, the real magic of VRS came through its inclusion of a simple scripting language.

Consisting of what was essentially a form of basic, the VRS scripting language allowed the designer to animate objects, send players to different areas, create enemies that would shoot back at you, and many other simple actions.  Through straightforward use of the language, it was a snap to create a room wherein the player could pick up a gun from a table, use it shoot a lock off a door, and then go through that door and into the next room.  While that might not sound like an amazing feat of technology, the only other way to do it at the time would’ve been to go out and get a very expensive and time-consuming lesson in C.

The thing that instantly grabbed me about VRS was the fact that it was so accessible; creating worlds was an incredibly easy process, and the scripting language was easy enough to pick up in just in a few minutes.  Within an hour of sitting down with the program, I created a simple room with a moving platform and a trap door that shot you if you didn’t flip a switch before opening it.  Again, I know this doesn’t sound like rocket science, but I was thirteen years old at the time and BASIC was the only language I knew – this felt like the world of game design was opening up before me.  Game creation software had always fascinated me, with plenty of projects created in Adventure Construction Set or Shoot ‘Em Up Construction Set.  But with VRS, I felt like I was entering the future – the 3d future.

The more I played around with the system, the more comfortable it felt.  Setting up object conditions became second nature, and I began to realize neat little “hacks” you could do to simulate more advanced functions that the engine didn’t really support.  It also made me realize the limitations of the engine, and left me wanting more.  Fortunately, a few years later, Virtual Reality Studio 2 was released, and some of my hopes were answered.  First of all, the software came with a VHS tape full of tutorials – if that didn’t scream hardcore, nothing did.  Also, VRS2 added a whole new world with the addition of transparent objects, fading, and spheres; suddenly the blocky, angular worlds of Freespace had sexy, jaggy curves.

One of my most ambitious projects in VRS2 set up something like this…

The player awakens from a cryogenic sleep in an abandoned underground facility.  Looking around, they quickly discover that they are very much alone, but that the facility is still very much active.  Can the player make their way through cave-ins, still active security systems, and other hazards to find their way back to the surface, and maybe find some answers?

Perhaps it isn’t the Citizen Kane of games, but cut a thirteen-year-old some slack.  I never did finish the game (VRS wasn’t so great for story-heavy games, anyway…), but I did have a heck of a good time designing the facility, building force-field traps and animating platforms.  Again, the accessibility here was the key; I didn’t need special 3d modeling programs, or mastery of creating textures in Photoshop, or a knowledge or programming much beyond BASIC.  I could just sit down, create some worlds, and have some fun.

There are a lot of 2-d game creators still floating around these days, with varying levels of complexity,  but I still have yet to see a 3d game creator with the elegant simplicity of Virtual Reality Studio (there was the recent release of Kodu on the 360, which I know can build 3d games, but I will admit I have yet to try it).  To me, Virtual Reality Studio was a wonderful tool for pouring my ideas into an (at the time) immersive world. My hope is that younger aspiring designers are able to find similar tools, and maybe find that same simple joy I did, even if the final products aren’t works of art by any stretch.

In the meantime, the original VRS is available for download here, if you are so inclined.  It’s clunky, antiquated, and a little fugly, but it still has charm.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to design the 3d game of the century.  The 20th century.