A Veteran Designer Talks VR’s ‘Commodore 64 Moment’

Game designer Jesse Schell, the CEO and founder of Schell Games, has worked on VR since the early ‘90s, pushing primitive hardware to its limits with teams of Disney Imagineers and student researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. Along the way, Schell also helped create one of VR gaming’s biggest hits: “I Expect You to Die,” a puzzler where players try to escape from perilous Bond-esque scenarios.

Today marks the release of a sequel to “I Expect You to Die,” which puts Schell Games on a short list of studios that have found enough success with a VR title to try to turn it into an enduring franchise. As Schell tells it, the trajectory of that success naturally looks different for a VR game in these still-early days of the medium.