Radial-G - Zero G racer for Oculus Rift from an AAA experienced team and interview!

It seems like everywhere you turn there's a new game touting support for Oculus Rift, the Kickstarter darling of the Virtual Reality renaissance. (I still can't believe it's taken over 20 years for the technology to catch up with the dream promised by the arcade Virtuality cabinets powered by Amiga 3000's to finally be able to deliver the realistic immersive experience we all dreamed about in the '90s). But 5 AAA industry guys have put together a fantastic looking zero-g racer designed with the Rift in mind (though it's also good without one on a regular flatscreen) and are looking to get the final push to completion funded through kickstarter.

Skip to 1:08 for single-screen footage

I have to say, Radial-G already looks totally stunning. What can be seen so far is already well polished and they have the makings of a top notch experience on their hands. They have a downloadable single player demo with working leader board for Windows that you can get right now, with a MacOS version imminent, and I'm told there's already a working multiplayer version (though that's not publicly available yet.)

With a team that has a massive breadth of game industry experience from the AAA world, including studios such as Disney Black Rock, Climax Racing Studios and NCsoft Europe this game promises to be an absolute corker if they achieve their funding, with some fantastic upper end backer rewards too, including an oculus DK2 in one reward tier!

I had the chance to have a quick chat with Sam Watts - Producer and community manager - about the project:

So I must say Radial-G looks fabmazing (I say looks as I can't play the demo right now as my gaming pc is out of action) what sort of machine is needed to run the demo nicely?

The demo runs on a range of kits and supports GFX cards from a lowly Intel HD4000 all the way up to the latest GeForce beasts. Ideally the CPU should be a mid-range i5 to get things really shiny! We're working on the DK2 build to support higher resolutions and framerates but not having received our DK2 unit ourselves, not seen what boost in performance you'll need to get the best out of the game.

The demo already seems pretty polished, how did you guys get together to do a VR game and go indie from your respective studios and how have you funded the efforts so far?

We all love VR and love racing games so we decided to stop talking about it in the pub and do something about it! And here we are, with a little bit of initial funding from friends, family and associates, we scraped enough together to form Tammeka Games and get the single player demo ready for the Kickstarter launch.

(Apart from VR) What's different about radial-g from other space racers that have gone before?

We feel it offers the futuristic rush that the current generation is crying out for, taking the best elements from those before, such as F-Zero, wipeout and Extreme-G, sadly three titles that look like we won't be seeing new versions of any time soon. Put all that together plus the thrill and danger of racing online with 32 players, it will be immense!

How did you decide to do a zero g racer as your first project?

As mentioned already, we all love VR and racing games and were pining after the lack of any decent ones available for modern computers so it was an easy decision to make Radial-G : Racing Revolved as our first game! We have so many ideas and plans for it post-release, to continue adding features, gameplay modes and more...

Burger or Sausage?

I love a good sausage but being based in Brighton, we have a load of amazing burger joints to choose from; Burger Brothers wouldn't serve me again if I said sausage!

I would chew my own leg off for this game and personally can't wait for it to be released and have already backed it myself... I may even get an oculus just because of it!

This project NEEDS to be successful - download the demo (no oculus needed...) and  back it here at kickstarter
Vote on Greenlight
Radial-G website
Tammeka games website

- Alistair Brugsch
@ABrugsch