Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward has been fascinated by the idea of virtual reality since he first read Snow Crash as a teenager. He backed the Oculus Kickstarter, and has been exploring many of the early VR prototypes over the last three years and started to create interactive stories. Little Pink Best Buds has some VR components and was created as a part of Double Fine’s 2-week Amnesia Fortnight game jam in 2014. Pen is currently exploring the bounds of identity in VR through a new adventure game and story that he’s working on, and he’s been taking inspiration from many different early VR prototypes but especially the out-of-body experiences he had in Robin Arnott’s Sound Self VR experience.

I had a chance to catch up with Pen at SIGGRAPH where he talked about Sound Self, contrasting his ability to express identity in real versus virtual spaces, how VR allows him to get out of his head, recreating a scene at the Black Sun virtual nightclub from Snow Crash, his explorations in social VR, and where he sees the metaverse is heading.