Othergate

A studio built by Oculus veterans

Othergate was founded in 2021 to explore what it calls the potential of immersive VR entertainment. The studio's own About page and its launch press release name four founding members: Ryan Rutherford, Andrew Welch, Fabio Brasiliense and Partel Lang. All four are former Oculus Studios game designers, and the studio states they share more than thirty combined years of virtual reality development.

Before Othergate, the founders worked together at Oculus for years, building prototypes and full games. Their earlier work includes the Herobound and Dead and Buried franchises, the Dead and Buried Arena location-based demo shown at Oculus Connect 6, and the Tiny Castles hand-tracking demo. Meta described the studio at launch as a team of six core developers who had worked together for well over a decade.

The games the founders made first

The founders' track record is a mobile-VR one. Herobound and Dead and Buried were Oculus-era titles that ran on hardware far less capable than a modern standalone headset, and they established the team's interest in comfort, readable controls and simple loops. That background explains a lot about how Othergate approached its own first game rather than somebody else's hardware.

Rutherford has said the team chose co-op because players were asking for more cooperative games, especially in VR, and because the medium lets people genuinely step into a role. Andrew Welch has described the technical gap: the team was experienced in mobile VR, but generating random dungeons from hundreds of chambers at the fidelity they wanted required heavy early investment in tools and graphics optimisation.

What Dungeons of Eternity is

Dungeons of Eternity is the studio's first VR game and its main product. It is a cooperative action role-playing game in which one to four players explore randomly generated fantasy dungeons. The pitch is simple: band together or go it alone, fight through crypts, castles and caverns, and collect loot that is generated fresh on every run, so no two descents play the same.

Combat is physics-driven and entirely hands-on. Players swing swords, throw axes, aim bows and wield magic staffs with their actual arms rather than through menus, and the store description lists more than a dozen unlockable weapons across several types. The game also promises character customisation, skills and an Outpost where you level up and prepare between runs.

How it launched and where it lives

Dungeons of Eternity released on the Meta Quest Store on 5 October 2023 at 29.99 US dollars, for Meta Quest 2, Quest Pro and Quest 3. The studio issued a launch press release the same day, quoting Rutherford on the goal of redefining cooperative gaming for VR. The game has since held a very high rating on the Quest store, with tens of thousands of player ratings.

A PC VR version followed on Steam, published by Othergate and tagged there as a VR-only action RPG and dungeon crawler. The Meta version has grown with the platform: the store listing now advertises four-player co-op, up from the three-player co-op described at launch. Several outlets named it among the best VR games of its launch year.

What the studio says it values

Othergate describes itself in narrow terms: high-quality, content-rich multiplayer VR experiences that are built to spark joy. It names immersion, creativity and fun as the values it works to. That is a deliberate focus on one platform and one format rather than a bid to be a general-purpose developer, and it has kept the studio's output concentrated on a single game.

The studio maintains its own support pages, update notes, a growing wiki and a Discord, which is unusual for a team of its size and a sign that live support is a large part of the work. It has continued to update Dungeons of Eternity rather than moving straight to a sequel, extending the game with new modes and realms over time.

A small team in a demanding medium

VR is an expensive place for a small studio. The audience is smaller than on flat screens, comfort and performance constraints are tighter, and a physics-driven co-op game adds networking on top of everything else. Othergate's decision to build one game and keep improving it, rather than spreading effort across several projects, is a reasonable response to those limits.

The founders' Oculus history gave the team an advantage that new VR developers rarely have: years of shipped experience on the exact hardware their game targets. That shows in the game's durability. Since 2023 it has stayed near the top of the Quest co-op pile, and the studio's own steady updates are the reason it has stayed there.

Games

• Dungeons of Eternity

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