Creating New Worlds

To understand virtual-reality (VR) video games, a person needs to get inside one.

You don’t see virtual reality, you are in virtual reality, says Andrew Eiche ’07.

“If I put you in a headset, I can assure you, you will be sold on VR. You have to experience it.”

Eiche started creating worlds — and experiences — at Owlchemy Labs in Austin, Texas, as the company’s “developer and producer-extraordinaire” in February 2016. He majored in computer engineering at the Thomas J. Watson School of Engineering and Applied Science at Binghamton University. Owlchemy was founded in 2010 by Alex Schwartz and Devin Reimer and is a leader in cutting-edge gaming in which players put on headsets and use specialized controllers to experience a game in 3-D. The company was acquired by Google on May 10.

“VR is so new and so weird that we don’t have tons of experience with it yet. We joke that we are building the plane while we’re flying it,” Eiche says. “We don’t know exactly how things will work every time. Sometimes we are totally wrong.”

Don’t be fooled. Eiche and Owlchemy Labs are doing something right.

Conan O’Brien played their flagship game — “Job Simulator”— on national television, and they just finished a project that will blow the minds of fans of a wildly popular animated TV show.

Getting the “Job Simulator” done

O’Brien made a photocopy of his own brain and shoved it inside a coffee machine.

“This is actually how I behave at the office,” O’Brien said as he hit the virtual button and the liquid flowed over the “copied” organ.

“You have to get that caffeine right into the brain! That is fantastic!” the comedian said to millions of his late-night talk-show viewers in November, when he played “Job Simulator.”

The comedian “ate” some donuts and “threw around” desktop toys — to the irritation of his “coworkers” — during the bit.

“Job Simulator” was Eiche’s first project at Owlchemy Labs. The game hinges on a simple concept: Players are thrust into a job — in an office cubicle, behind a grill, in a mechanic’s garage or at a convenience store — and given some straightforward tasks to complete, except that the year is 2050 and most of the world is automated.

Much of the appeal of the game comes from the antics that people can pull, like firing staples at coworkers, serving burned hot dogs to patrons and filling gas tanks with energy drinks.

“The fun of ‘Job Simulator’ comes from combining objects in goofy ways, testing to see if the developers have thought of what might happen when you put dish soap in a smoothie in the restaurant or throw everything you can find at a robot,” IGN.com’s Dan Stapleton said in his review of the game. “It’s really impressive how many things they’ve anticipated and how interactive all of these environments are. Every drawer or cabinet opens, and there’s usually something fun to play with hidden inside.”

Being one of the first successful games in the space, “Job Simulator” is an early VR experience for many. It shot to the top of many PlayStation 4 charts shortly after its October release, but it was just the beginning for Eiche.

Virtual Rick-ality

Fans of the popular Adult Swim (Cartoon Network) animated series Rick and Morty are gobbling up Eiche’s latest project, which is built on “Job Simulator’s” technology and came out in April.

The game is called “Rick and Morty Simulator: Virtual Rick-ality,” and it “smashes together the absolute VR chaos of ‘Job Simulator’ with the ridiculous, all-out, take-no-prisoners comedy of Rick and Morty,” says the Owlchemy Labs website.

The series follows mad scientist Rick Sanchez and his worried but loyal grandson Morty, who split their time between family dilemmas and interdimensional adventures. The show has a Back to the Future feel, but, like the game, it really has to be experienced instead of explained.

“I’ve been a huge fan of Rick and Morty since it first came out. When I found it on a Reddit post late in season one, I watched all the episodes in one sitting with my friends that night,” Eiche says. “We were hooked! I even went to a Halloween party with a friend dressed up as Headists [a “religious” sect that worships beings called Cromulons in a plotline from the fifth episode of the second season].”

A demo version of “Virtual Rick-ality” was unveiled at the San Diego Comic-Con last year.

The game premiered in April for $30 on the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. Players start as a clone of Morty created in the family garage. Rick makes the clone do some laundry so a player can get used to the controls. Rick and Morty then jump through a portal on one of their missions, and the player is left to mess around with objects in the room.

Even with the zany characters in the Rick and Morty universe, getting each of them to interact with a human gamer in a believable way that’s true to the series was challenging for Eiche and the development team.

“Making the characters feel alive, and not crossing into the ‘uncanny valley,’ was difficult. We did a ton of work to make characters feel natural and act as you would expect them to,” Eiche says.

Inevitably, there were times when the team ran into creative roadblocks. All it took was an email to Rick and Morty creator Justin Roiland (Dan Harmon is co-creator), and Eiche and the Owlchemy team got all sorts of hilarious feedback notes and newly improvised dialogue. Roiland does the voice work for both characters.

“Getting to work with Justin and the entire team that makes the show, and, of course, Adult Swim, was a dream come true,” Eiche says. “Getting into that world and being able to create something has been incredibly special.”

Before it even came out, the game had generated a lot of hype.

“Just hanging out in the world of Rick and Morty is such a trip. Again, the inherent strangeness baked into the show’s premise is a perfect fit for the slightly uncanny nature of even the best VR experience,” Geek.com’s Jordan Minor said after playing the demo. “When attending a convention like this as media, there aren’t a whole lot of surprises typically. This year, that surprise was “Rick and Morty Simulator: Virtual Rick-ality,” and it was awesome,” said David Jagneux of uploadvr.com after he tried the game at PAX West.

Players don’t need any experience to drop right into the virtual world of Rick and Morty, but it took a lot of nongaming experiences for Eiche to get where he is.

Getting his gaming on

Growing up, Eiche was an all-state flute and bass player at Vestal High School, down the road from the Binghamton University.

As a Bearcat, he was part of WHRW, Pipe Dream, the Information Technology Services Residential Computer Consulting Program (ResCon), the EngiNet distance-learning program, the University Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, the Harpur Jazz Ensemble and founder of the Binghamton University Pep Band.

He wanted to be a political science major before choosing electrical and computer engineering.

“I really liked doing lots of different things that pushed me to think in different ways,” Eiche says. “I really believe that in order to make great games, you have to be into things that really have nothing to do with games. I was lucky that Binghamton had a lot of opportunities for those kind of nongaming things, and it was something that I took advantage of.”

Gaming was never too far from mind, though.

There were mornings Eiche woke up with a Sega Genesis controller still in his hand.

“During a class freshman year [at Binghamton], Andrew made a first-person shooting-style game for a project on reducing energy use in a building, while the rest of the class was making posters,” Brooke Eiche — Andrew’s mother — says.

“We all kind of knew that once he realized the passion he has for computers, he would get into games, but I think he surprised himself a little bit,” Curt Eiche, Andrew’s father, says. “I remember him coming home for a holiday and saying to me, ‘Can you believe that they let us do this kind of stuff?’”

The Eiche family is full of engineers. Brooke is a systems and petroleum engineer with Lockheed Martin, Curt was an electrical engineer before retiring from Lockheed, brother Kevin studied engineering at Penn State, and brother Tom ’13 was a mechanical engineering major at Binghamton.

“I had a lot of support from my family in all of the different things I’ve done,” Eiche says. “There is no way you can experience so many different things if you don’t have that kind of support.”

After graduation, Eiche was an electrical engineer for Lockheed Martin in Owego. He also worked at General Dynamics, Booz Allen Hamilton and North Star Games before landing at Owlchemy Labs.

Eiche credits the Watson School with giving him the technical skills needed to get into gaming and pushing him beyond the code on a screen. His college experiences as part of a team, communicating and writing, were crucial to what he does now.

“I don’t think there is a better place to learn,” he says. “In the Watson School, I learned how to learn. I learned so much about communication and writing that aren’t just the hard engineering. I’ve noticed that a lot of my peers don’t really have that.”

“As part of the group that I work with, you really have to be able to swallow your pride a little bit and know that ideas don’t always work. You have to bury the ego. The product, the game, is what matters. I’ve had a dozen ideas in a week that didn’t work out, and it doesn’t matter. You learn it isn’t about you, and that’s something that I first started experiencing at Binghamton,” he says. “That is a life experience, more than an engineering one.”