Brantisky Interactive is me. Given name, Phillip. A solo Unity VR developer with 9 years of experience.

I'd just started my first -real- job (enterprise tech support) and was in new-hire training when I saw the original Oculus kickstarter (never forget). I thought back to earlier years, recreating my childhood home as a level in both Doom and Quake, obsessing over the idea of the holodeck on Star Trek, and fooling around with a pirated copy of 3D modelling software I'd never be able to afford. (Thank goodness for Blender!) I remembered dipping my toes into Pascal and Quake-C programming and going cross-eyed. Above all I remembered being lucky enough to experience Dactyl Nightmare at a mall in Houston. My scrawny neck could barely steady the gargantuan HMD atop my head. It was pixelated and stuttery. It ... kind-of really sucked. But it was obvious that this technology could work if all of the individual components became smaller. Thankfully that's exactly what technology does.

A lot of time had passed between all of that and where I found myself in 2012 at this new job. Two decades. In that time I'd experienced games like Morrowind, GTA, Deus Ex, Bioshock, Fallout 3, etc. - games that simulated every possible element of the world and gave the player enough freedom to feel truly immersed in it. I'd also had a lot of time where I didn't care about games at all. I learned to play guitar/drums/keys, played in some local bands, and I'd earned most of a college degree in Creative Writing with a minor in French. I'd worked at two different Walgreens for a collective ~4 years before finally getting this -real job.

My interest in the current state of video games was teetering. I'm sitting in new-hire training. I see the Oculus kickstarter (never forget), and I decide what my five year plan is. I downloaded Unity and Blender onto the only computer I still had, an 11-inch Macbook that was just about obsolete, and I started studying the Unity documentation the way I studied in school - with a paper notebook and a pencil. I payed particular attention whenever performance optimization was mentioned.

I released a couple of floppy, underdeveloped, non-VR titles as I was learning because I couldn't afford to keep up with the hardware costs to stay in the VR space. My five year plan stretched into an 8 year plan, but I was finally able to afford to quit that -real- job I'd grown to hate. This was March 2021. I was doing freelance VR work, and I was making rapid progress on my first VR game. The kind of experience that people said would be impossible for a mobile VR headset. "Unless it's AAA, it'll never happen" they'd say.

Well I like a challenge.

And we all need an escape from time to time.