Indie VR hit Gorilla Tag has been staggeringly popular despite only being available thus far on Quest’s App Lab. Now the primate-centric romp is on the main Quest Store, officially making it the most-rated game on the entire store in the process, even surpassing Beat Saber, one of VR’s best-known apps.

Update (December 16th, 2022): Gorilla Tag has just landed on the official Quest Store, still priced for free. The original article announcing the move to leave App Lab follows below:

Original Article (November 30th, 2022): App Lab is Meta’s ‘unlisted’ app store for Quest, which allows developers a way onto the platform but precludes them from being promoted or easily found through the main Quest store that most customers see.

Still, we’ve seen apps find success on App Lab, and none more so than Gorilla Tag, a simple game of multiplayer tag with unique hand-based locomotion and charmingly low-fi visuals, which has succeeded in finding an audience despite not being visible in the main Quest store.

Having only been on App Lab since March 2021, Gorilla Tag has already amassed 46,000 reviews; that’s more than any other Quest app—even those on the main store—including Beat Saber’s 45,000 reviews, which is perhaps VR’s most well known game to date. Compared to Beat Saber, Gorilla Tag of course has the advantage of being free, but the game also has the most reviews among free apps too—even those on the main store—pulling ahead of the top free app, Rec Room, which sits at 22,000 reviews.

And now the game is finally headed to the main Quest store, where it’s destined to only become more popular. Developer Kerestell Smith has announced a Gorilla Tag release date of December 15th on the main Quest store. Gorilla Tag is also available on PC VR.

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Smith began Gorilla Tag as a one-man project under the studio name Another Axiom. With the game’s explosive popularity, Smith has grown the studio to 15 people, according to Meta.

Gorilla Tag’s popularity isn’t only measured in reviews though; Smith said earlier this year that the game had reached a staggering 4.5 million players.

And where has the app found such traction, despite being ‘unlisted’ in the Quest store? Smith tells Road to VR that TikTok has been a huge driver, with the hashtag #gorillatag seeing 4.4 billion views to date—purely organic, according to the developer.

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Ben Lang
Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."

  • Medal of Honor sucked. Your opinions are suspect.

  • Tommy

    My kids love this game. I tried it for about five minutes and almost broke my wrist. It’s fun but I can’t see spending more than a couple hours on it.

  • Tommy

    I’d throw the cooking sims in with those too. Casual games are great for getting people into VR but sucks for most of us that want higher quality and more in depth games.

    • Yes, of course: those, too ….

  • ViRGiN

    Finally a reason to buy into PCVR.
    Constantly in TOP 5 by player count, those PCVR users with their expensive hardware can not be wrong!

  • kool

    Its the highly opinionated gamers¿ that tanked medal of honor not the kids actually having fun playing vr.

  • ViRGiN

    what are you even talking about!
    rec room, beat saber, gorilla tag, blade and sorcery and pavlov are the MASTERPISSES, the pinaccle of VR gaming, bees knees.
    Especially pavlov, with it’s hundreds of minecraft maps and mcdonalds ttt!

  • Ben Lang

    People like what they like, can’t say they’re wrong.

    • Sure I can.
      If what they like is crap, I can say they’re wrong.
      Simple.

      But I think a lot of people misunderstand:
      I’m not saying GT in and of itself is “bad”.
      I mean it IS, but I’m just not SAYING that …. lol
      After all, is “PONG” “bad” …? Is “Pac-Man” “bad” …?
      They & GT are what they are.

      The problem I have is with people lauding GT like it’s “Alyx 2”.
      THAT’S really what I don’t like.

      • ViRGiN

        MOH wasn’t HORRIBLE, but really missed out on standard controls that everyone got acustomed to over the years.
        but in an era where pcvr elitists claim skyrim IS a good game, “just need to install 600 mods and rtx4090 with supersampling set to 0.25”, the reception, the hate is PURELY on those elitists having unreasonable standards while playing everything below these standards already.

        That being said, it’s gone from Quest top seller section as well. There are simply better/more popular games.

      • cleaverboy

        you’re using the word ‘wrong’ wrong

    • Jonathan Winters III

      Exactly!

  • I just wish GTAG would just add official mod support, because all the people asking me to provide a way to install mods with headset only is getting annoying. I do make the app to install BONELAB, Blade & Sorcery: Nomad and Ragnarock mods.

  • And I still remember criticizing the game because the serial numbers on the rifles were wrong.

  • Compliments to the dev!

  • Ookami

    Medal of Honor? seriously? Hey, maybe you love it, and I’m fine with that. But most people did not like it. It looks very uninspired to me.
    Gorilla Tag is popular because a large percentage of Quest 2 users are kids, and it’s a free game. It may be a low effort game (the dev himself said as much), but it kind of struck gold with it’s movement system. It’s just something people–especially kids–find very fun.

    • KRAKEN

      Kids are dumb and games like these killed VR

      • Ookami

        That makes absolutely no sense. What difference does it make if all the kids with meta headsets play a freeware game or not? It’s not like they have money to buy games themselves most of the time, and their parents aren’t likely to purchase other games just because they aren’t playing Gorilla Tag. You people with your melodramatic “VR is dead” sure love to just attack anything you don’t personally like.

        • KRAKEN

          what happens is big devs look at this and dont want to invest in AAA games.
          Its not melodramatic, make a list of AAA games.
          Its just garbage upon garbage

          • Ookami

            The existence of low-quality games does not affect the existence of high-quality games. That’s not how it works. AAA studios aren’t investing in VR because VR is still niche and is a much bigger risk.

  • Mr.Philgood

    Medal of Honor made some poor choices. It takes over 20 minutes until you can actually play (interact) in the game when you start it. Before it’s tutorial and people talking to you. If I get a game like this, I want to shoot stuff.

    Also, the game takes so much space on your Quest, and a big part of it is the documentary that is not part of the game. Why is that not an optional downloadable part?

    • Jistuce

      Ugh. I hate extended lockouts at the beginning of a game. That’s been a bane on my existence for a couple decades now.

      Man, I remember when it was just complaining about all the unskippable logos before the title screen. Then it was “set your controller aside for a half an hour or so, you won’t be needing it” and I missed the days where I spent five minutes mashing start futilely at the random corporate logos.

  • Papa

    There’s unfortunately an autoban feature that bans you permanently for reasons that are a mystery to everyone it happens to and there’s no way to fix it.

  • NinjaMonkeyMark

    NO ONE is more bummed out that we are not getting more detailed long form action/ adventure games with a long single player campaign that is full of great game play and narrative than I am. That being said. I have only played Gorilla Tag once, for about three hours straight with my two brother-in-laws. I can’t remember the last time I laughed that hard (couldn’t breath at times), and I was sweeting so bad I soaked the cloth material surrounding the shell of my Quest 1 all the way to the cameras (gross!). We had a really good time, and I see why so many keep jumping in. Also, I’m not sure if the Dev team of Gorilla Tag are the team that would bring the next great follow up to Alyx or Medal of Honor.

    • KRAKEN

      you can have fun throwing stones at people too

  • ViRGiN

    it’s not ALL VR online. that’s completly bullshit.
    contractors squeakers are like one in 100000 chance. essentially non-existent.
    adult gunplay with adult quality.
    kids are MAGNETIZED to low effort shits like pavlov or onward.

    • namekuseijin

      Or gorilla crap

  • ViRGiN

    any game that officially supports mods, but doesnt have in-game mod downloader like contractors should be illegal.
    i dont play bonelab, but the support is official, they just dont have a hosting service, right?
    there is bonelab on modio, but OF COURSE, its all UTTER LOW QUALITY FUNNY MEME COMPILATIONS dogshit mods. sandbox is such a boring cancer.
    the game died even on PC, having about 0.02% of launch player count.

  • ViRGiN

    Alyx was irrelevant even for PCVR. Just play it and sell it.
    What VR, Quest or not needs, is COD/WARZONE/BATTLEFIELD. Granted the latest BF was quite poop, but COD/Warzone are super solid titles. Single game to keep you for years. Campaign + infinite multiplayer.

    Alyx was absolutetly boring to me, and didn’t even come close to HL2. The HL2 mod is more enjoyable. Just another ultra-hyped title. If it didn’t have HL title, it would be as relevant as LONN.

  • ViRGiN

    there is ‘war dust vr mobile’ coming to quest, its called firezone, but its absolutetly shitty gameplay but does have all the basics of battlefield. vehicles, parachutes etc. but it’s going to flop, its not good enough.
    yeah contractors needs vehicles asap

  • Runesr2

    Like some say “eat feces, 8 million flies can’t be wrong”

  • Osvaldo Macias

    korbin

  • cleaverboy

    i tried it few months ago and couldn’t figure out how to get out of the intro level. it definitely needed more tutorials and lacked polish.

  • KRAKEN

    This is the reason AAA VR is dead.

    People that get VR, interested in trash level games.

  • Highdaoist

    Could you please give us some MORE?

  • ben

    i love gorilla tag!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  • bendover

    please