Electric Nightmares

Our four part series about generative AI and its use in video games

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Stage Presence: A More Realistic, Virtual Reality Rock Band

What VR was made for

The email I received about Stage Presence, an Oculus Rift game where you must keep an angry festival crowd happy with nothing but your microphone, contained a single sentence that convinced me to post it. "I promise not to rename it 'Bez Simulator 2014'." Think how fast I'd have posted it if developer Jon Dadley had promised that he would rename it that.

Wonder what it's like to stand on stage and dodge bottles being thrown at you by a mob? Watch the trailer below.

From that same email:

Stage Presence puts you and your band on stage at music festival in front of a huge crowd. Your bands equipment fails and you have to use the only working microphone on stage to keep the crowd entertained. If they get bored of your "singing" they'll let you know by booing, shining lasers in your eyes and throwing bottles at you (some filled with urine). If you win them over they'll jump around, wave flags, cheer, let off fireworks and flares.

Alas, I can't try this out for myself as I've given back my borrowed Oculus Rift. Also there's nothing I could do with a microphone that could keep anyone happy, let alone a festival crowd baying for blood. I do quite fancy a middle class version of same, though: the power's gone out at Wimbeldon and you, Cliff Richard, are the only nice young man who can save the day.

There's a Kickstarter on the way, but Stage Presence has been in publicly playable form since back in May. Given Glastonbury is this weekend it seems the perfect time to empathise both with crowds sinking into the mud and inexperienced musicians. Version 1.7 is downloadable at the Oculus Developer forums now.

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Graham Smith avatar

Graham Smith

Deputy Editorial Director

Rock Paper Shotgun's former editor-in-chief and current corporate dad. Also, he continues to write evening news posts for some reason.

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