After a decade in VR, UK studio nDreams is ready for the big time

By Alex Spencer

Synapse has you entering the mind of a Colonel Kurtz-like figure, where you fight manifestations of his subconscious. Which eases the guilt of toying mercilessly with them

LEFT Synapse offers a skill tree for unlocking permanent abilities, such as the ability to lift enemies with telekinesis, plus one-off upgrades that expire at the end of each run.

BELOW Guns are reloaded manually, by ejecting the clip and pushing it back in. This can be done with your other hand, or by pushing it against your body, the scenery, or even an enemy’s skull

NDreams co-founder Tamsin O’Luanaigh

virtual reality isn’t the easiest place to make a long-term home. The wall of technology that greets us at nDreams’ studio is testament to that. With examples from Nintendo’s Virtual Boy through to modern devices, it serves as a potted VR history – and a reminder of how many shifts and dead ends we’ve seen through the years. Even the decade since Oculus Rift’s debut prompted a VR resurgence has seen major players come and go, hardware advances that render the previous generation obsolete, and a pervasive sense of potential not quite realised. In spite of all this, though, this year the Farnborough-based nDreams marks its tenanniversary as a developer of VR games exclusively.

“I wish I could tell you, ‘Oh, it’s been an absolute dream – we’ve never had any problems at all’, but that might be a little bit of a white lie,” says Tamsin O’Luanaigh, who co-founded the company with her husband in 2006, before the pivot to VR in 2013. “Running a business is hard, full stop, no matter what industry you’re in. Running a games business is hard. Running a games business in an emerging market, where you don’t have data on what’s coming up, and then you add in funding challenges, pushing for technical innovation – that’s really hard.”

“ I T ’ S A L W A Y S B E E N V R . W E ’ V E N E V E R W A V E R E D F R O M T H A T . W E C O U L D A L W A Y S S E E T H E F U T U R E ”

Given that, there must have been some temptation over the years to step away from this one technology, and hew closer to the gaming mainstream? On this point David Corless, nDreams’ VP of publishing, is firm: “It’s always been VR. We’ve never wavered from that. We could always see the future, and the potential, and so we stuck with it. Yes, it was rough for a few years here and there, and we had some… interesting times. But the goal was always, at the end of that first five- or ten-year cycle – however long it was going to take – that when the market started to grow, we were at the forefront.”

Indeed, nDreams has done more than survive. At the end of its first decade in VR it has expanded vastly. Today it employs 220 people, across four studios – “we’re probably the biggest VR studio out there,” Corless reckons. And alongside at least five in-house projects currently in the works, it’s begun publishing thirdparty VR titles and has partnered with another unlikely British success story, helping to bring PowerWash Simulator into VR. We’re here to learn about all of that, and about where nDreams is headed next. First, though, there’s the matter of a soldier dangling in mid-air, right in front of our face.