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When Palmer Luckey and his colleagues set up their famous Kickstarter campaign back in 2012, they introduced Oculus Rift as "a new virtual reality (VR) headset designed specifically for video games that will change the way you think about gaming forever". Their convincing pitch raised $2.4m to build the first development kits, despite only asking for $250,000.I was one of the 9522 people who bought into it, despite my personal scepticism about Kickstarter, a service that offers very little recourse to people who pledge money if things then go sour. For whatever reason, I had $300 that I could bear to part with at the time, I looked at the materials and judged that I would probably get the development kit I was being told would be manufactured, and it all worked out. When my kit turned up some months later and, after a bit of faffing around, I was able to walk around the train station in Half-Life 2 as though I was really there, I had no regrets.
Two years later, Palmer Luckey still talks about how his "foray into virtual reality was driven by a desire to enhance my gaming experience", even as he posts on Reddit explaining that Oculus has sold itself for $2bn to Facebook, a company whose main relationship with games is helping the people who make horrendous ones become extraordinarily rich. I still have no regrets, because I got what I wanted, but the whole episode will be a cautionary tale for anyone who thought Oculus' Kickstarter was more like a pinky-promise to put gaming at the centre of the next generation of virtual reality.
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