Our Investment in Vital Reality (Origami Game Engine)

Origami is a new game engine being built by Vital Reality, a group based in Los Angeles. It’s led by industry veterans Mike Haller and Roberto Rodruigez — two people who have been around the block when it comes to game development and publishing. Mike heads up the business and Roberto is leading an outstanding group of developers keen to disrupt the space.

Roberto has spent a good portion of his career re-architecting and fixing AAA games for releases that have run behind schedule with development issues. He’s earned his stripes solving tough technical problems for studios at crunch time (such as at Activision’s Call of Duty studio, Infinity Ward). For some time now Roberto’s been thinking about what a better game engine could look like, which is coming to fruition in Origami.

I won’t get into the details of the engine, but I will mention a couple of key concepts: it’s built for the cloud and it has a modular architecture. The promise of cloud gaming is enchanting and we truly do believe in it, but there are technical limitations that make it difficult for game developers. Origami is built in such a way that helps mitigate a lot of these limitations by taking better advantage of the resources available to it. The timing is ideal for new technology that can fully access the power of modern chipsets that will drive both cloud gaming and the new consoles from PlayStation and Xbox.

The modular architecture of the engine and its data driven design is important because it allows Origami to update specific portions of the engine without affecting the whole system. For developers, this means two things: not worrying about engine updates for your games and an easier way to integrate third party systems.

People, technology, and market; we’re investing in all three with Origami. We expect cloud gaming to change the market in the future and Origami has the right team and technology to lead the way. We couldn’t be more thrilled to join them on the journey.

A beta-release of the engine for select studios is expected later this year, we are excited to provide more information about the engine when it is available to the public.