Palmer Luckey: the fairytale hero drowning in reality
AUGUST 23RD, 2016 — POST 232
The Facebook-owned Oculus is having a hard time. The company’s first product, the Rift VR headset, launched without a dedicated input method. Consequently, initial supply of Rifts was reportedly at the mercy of Microsoft’s supply of Xbox One controllers, the input method boxed with the Rift. The Rift’s only real competitor, Valve and HTC’s Vive, did launch with dedicated, motion-based controllers.
As such, the burgeoning VR market was fragmented from the jump — games that were built around motion controllers and games that weren’t. So popular has the Vive become — in part because of its controller but also its “spacial”-tracking — that Oculus made moves to close down an exploit that allowed Rift-exclusive games to be played on Vive, arguably to preserve software exclusivity when their hardware was being outsold. For a company that recaptured the industry’s imagination in VR, jaded by decades of failure, Oculus is already tripping over hurdles in the race for high-end VR hardware they started.
And as Polygon reported yesterday, Oculus is about to head in to a legal battle with ZeniMax, the game developer and publisher that has been across monolithic titles such as The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, and Doom among others. The battle centres on Oculus CTO John Carmack, a former employee of ZeniMax and co-founder of ZeniMax subsidiary id Software. ZeniMax’s contention is that, during Carmack’s final weeks as an employer before moving to Oculus, he was working to improve the Oculus Rift prototype that was given to him by Oculus CEO Palmer Luckey — and that he stole ZeniMax software and leveraged ZeniMax employees’ internal knowhow to do it. Once again, Luckey’s Oculus, trading in virtual realities, is having to face up to hard, actual realities.
What makes Oculus’ and by extension Luckey’s struggles so hard to bear witness to is Luckey himself. The smart-as-a-whip kid who bootstrapped his way to a working VR prototype out of readily available components — hacking the thing into ski goggles with duct tape — not only fit the archetype of the maker generation but built something people were going wild for. And Luckey has always been one of “us”, seemingly motivated initially by the same impulse that resides in every video game player, “How can I get this setup better?”. But when we buy better headphones, or set up multiple monitors, he made a VR headset that would set the agenda for the industry.
The incompatibility of Luckey’s cargo-shorts-and-bare-feet normalness with the increasingly polished and dressed-up industry he was coming to change began to show. Most notably, a TIME cover of Luckey — superimposed onto a beach scene, floating with the Rift over his eyes — illustrated two things: the user could change the industry, and the industry and larger world fundamentally just didn’t get it. However, as unfortunate as it might be, with the company owned by one of Big Tech in Facebook, the industry and the larger world have to now be handled by Luckey. That photo came to signal that one of “us” was being funnelled into a world that he might not be equipped to handle.
There’s a sense in which generations of video game players move as quickly as generations of video game consoles. Luckey was part of the Xbox 360 generation — at 23, he came of age during the huge strides made in first-person gaming, in graphical fidelity, and in online multiplayer. He’s part of a middle generation of video game players — we grew up on the 64-bit Nintendo 64 and dreamt increasingly of immersion offered in titles like Fallout 3 and Mirror’s Edge.
Luckey was the one who broke out to make good on those dreams, dreams that still serve as one of the most power consumer forces in the industry. But those dreams are constantly punctured by delivery dates, digital rights management, and non-compete clauses in employment contracts. We want to believe in Luckey because we want to believe the industry we love and invest so much time in is powered by dreams and run by dreamers. Oculus’ turbulence proves that this belief can only be one thing: a dream itself.
If you enjoyed this, please take the time to recommend, respond, and share this piece wherever you think people will enjoy it. All of these actions not only help this piece to be read but also let me know what kinds of things to focus on in my daily writing.
Thanks, I really appreciate it.
