Pixel Ripped 1978 is an upcoming VR game about making games for the Atari 2600 at the height of the console’s popularity.
You play as a woman named Barbara, or Bug, who has just started a job at the then-all-conquering Atari. Bug is a programmer on the rise and has created a Tron-style way to enter the games she’s working on to fix their bugs and broken code from the inside. To help her do this, she’s created a video game heroine of her own named Dot, into whose shoes she steps to battle back the bugs hiding in her own games.
Your job is to journey into a litany of real-world Atari 2600-era classics like Crystal Castles, Fast Freddie, and Yars’ Revenge, patch them up, and get them ready to ship.
Genuinely can’t stress this enough: I think this is one of the best ideas anyone has had for a VR stackhat to date.
Pixel Ripped 1978 is the latest in a series of well-loved VR games by developer ARVORE. Previous titles also featured the heroine Dot and were about creating games in approximations of era-appropriate hardware. Pixel Ripped 1995 was all about making games for a system that was definitely not the SNES. Pixel Ripped 1989, the original, was all about making games for a GameBoy-styled handheld.
Pixel Ripped 1978 is, however, the first title in the series to feature a licensed console, thanks to ARVORE’s publishing partnership with Atari itself. That this will be the series’ third outing speaks to its appeal, even among VR enthusiasts hungry for a unique experience.
These are games that are in conversation with video game preservation as much as they are interested in video game design and immersing the player in the history of the medium. It’s such a fascinating way to have the player engage with history, and VR is a perfect medium for it.
Pixel Ripped: 1978 is bound for Meta and Steam VR platforms and PSVR2. It does not yet have a release date.
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