Untethered is Back. With a new name on new platforms.
AREA MAN LIVES coming to Oculus Quest, Rift and Vive VR headsets in 2020
This is a post that I HAVE wanted to write for a long time!
We are excited to announce that AREA MAN LIVES, a reimagining of our previously unfinished project Untethered, will be released in 2020 on the Oculus Quest, Rift, and Steam VR platforms!
When we lost our funding during production of episode 3 of Untethered in 2017, we looked for a publishing partner who could help us finish the series. Unfortunately, we were unable to secure further funding, and so we reluctantly placed the project on hiatus until circumstances changed.
We love the world we were building in Untethered and longed for an opportunity to give the game the ending it deserved. In 2018 we became friends with the legendary world-builder Rand Miller, co-founder of Cyan, the makers of a couple of little games in the 90’s called Myst and Riven. (We were starstruck too!)
As our friendships with Rand and Ryan Warzecha over at Cyan grew closer, we started looking for ways to collaborate on a new project. Our studios shared similar philosophies about games in VR, and we both loved the idea of stretching the medium a little. We took the time to dream together of all the things we’d love to make if we had unlimited time and resources, and a few things became clear:
Our companies both believe in the future of VR.
We are most interested in building worlds that take players off the beaten path, with nuanced stories, rich worlds, and characters you can’t quit thinking about.
The only way we can ensure that these fringe VR experiences get made, is if we commit to seeing them through no matter what.
Cyan is not a big company. They very much exhibit the spirit of Indie game dev through their love for their fans and their ability to create sprawling and rich worlds with limited resources. Over the last few years, we’ve realized that Numinous Games as a studio can’t do this on our own. As indie devs, we need each other to strengthen the areas where we are weak and share in opportunities as they come along so that the rising tide of indie game development raises all boats.
In many ways, working with Cyan is like working with an older and wiser weird uncle. The more we spend time with them, the more we realize that the acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree. They’re just as stubborn as we are in their “artistic idealism,” we’ve looked up to them our whole life, and they’ve seen some crazy stuff and lived to tell us about it.
Untethered is one of those projects we couldn’t quit thinking about. We kept returning to the world of Untethered, wishing we could return to the project we’d invested a lot of money, time, and love into, and both Rand and Ryan at Cyan immediately saw the potential of what our project could become.
So, we got the team back together, and in the summer of 2019, we invited Rand to my office in Loveland, Colorado. It was basically an office in a closet, but the devs who graciously let me occupy it, let us use the conference room. Armed with a box full of breakfast burritos, we worked out a plan to revive the series in a new form. We embraced room scale VR. We’ve added some puzzling. We’ve created a slew of new characters, some ridiculously silly monsters, and leaned even further into the question of “What if you could live inside a radio drama?”
The result, AREA MAN LIVES, is everything you loved about the odd world of Untethered, with even more quirky nonsense and radio drama.
We so appreciate the support that our fans gave us on the Daydream platform. I will always have a soft-spot in my heart for underdog platforms. Since Daydream has since gone the way of the Ouya, we’ve also realized we have to continue to move forward.
Thankfully we will now be able to come to multiple platforms including the Oculus Quest. For those of you making the VR migration with us, welcome! Reach out with your story, of what you loved about Untethered, and we’ll get you signed up for the beta of AREA MAN LIVES.
We’re excited to share our new, old story with an even wider audience in this new medium we’ve come to adore.
Stay Tuned,
Ryan, Amy, Josh, and Mike with the Numinous Games Team.