E McNeill’s VR classic Darknet finally made the jump to Quest headsets as Darknet: Remastered.
The trailer for Darknet is embedded below and you’ll want to take particular note of the timestamp on its publication of October 6, 2014. Darknet is the first VR game that was released on Samsung Gear VR. This headset has been dubbed the “first consumer VR device”. In the three years following, it launched on the Oculus Rift Store, the original PlayStation VR, Steam, and Google Daydream, an early pioneer of cross-platform VR availability.
I took the game for a spin on Quest and it is just as I remember it. The game is described by the creator as a “strategy/puzzle in which you are an elite hacker on the Net.” Players “Plug in cyberspace using viruses, exploits and worms in order to steal data before it gets tracked.” Inspirations include TRON, Neuromancer, The Matrix, and Johnny Mnemonic, and it won a VR Jam all the way back in 2013.
McNeill’s forward-thinking project, which works great seated in a swivel chair, was a stand-out first-time experience for many buyers of the Gear VR Innovator Edition. For me, whenever I gather a bunch of windows around myself in a modern Quest or Vision Pro headset, a part of me still thinks back to the vibe of McNeill’s early hacker role-play managing nodes in Darknet.
After Darknet, McNeill made a number of impressive VR projects including Tactera, Skylight, Astraeus, Ironlights and Ironstrike, and you can learn more about them all on his website.
You can find Darknet: Remastered for $9.99 as of this writing.