It's the start of October in 2022. My friend Connor is texting me telling me of a VR game that him and a mutual friend between us two is also playing - RecRoom. I had seen it on the quest store front page before, but never thought it was "my type of game" to play. I was mostly playing Beat Saber and Space Pirate DX, but nonetheless - I wanted to play some games with Connor so I got RecRoom.
I remember being on the phone with Connor as I set up my avatar. It was simple - black blazer, spiky hair, and the standard eyes and mouth. I remember getting the green stunt runner gloves which I added later on, but let's skip back to the beginning;
Hudson got on after I made my account, and I remember my first room I made. It was on the old maker pen with the purple screen. The room consisted of:
1. A fuckload of guns on the floor and a bar stool and broom here and there
2. A white and black checker board floor
3. A floating platform with a holotar on it
4. A big ass orange wall that stretched up really high
5. A game configuration and scoreboard projector
We had a lot of fun building it, it didn't visually look great but it was chaotic in a fun way. We had fun playing that for that morning, but unfortunately the battery of the Quest 1s weren't really revolutionary, so I did have to get off.
That shit blew my mind.
It was really generational to see a place in a virtual world where you can just.. be yourself. And build whatever bullshit or masterpiece you wanted to just because you felt like it.
My next creation was mostly made myself. It was a PvP map called HKPvP - if you couldn't tell, it's short for HatKidPvP. This was more where I learned how to use Subrooms and made more experimental games, like a snowball fight room that looked so bad - I shit you not it was a fence for before the game started, a plain white floor, and snowballs just around the map - as well as the game config that gave you an extra pile of snowballs every time you respawned.
Now time goes on and I make more things, learn CV2, yadda yadda, and I set RecRoom to be on one half while I work on another passion - Discord Bot Coding - and holy shit did those two mix together very well. I made bots for other people as a past-time and a way to learn the ins and outs and different things. Lo and Behold - SquishBot, one I made for a RecRoom creator named BoxHeadSquish.
It pretty much ran most of the server, including tickets, moderation tools, and even silly other things such as having the server count up and up one at a time - and even a stupid dumb little AI back before AI was the biggest thing on earth.
Now with the trust of Squish - I was going to bomb his whole operation and delete everything in the discord
nah im kidding
I got to work with Squish contributing to one of the top trending rooms at the time - "HowHardCanYouPunch". I made some shitty music that I thought was good (THAT SHIT WAS NOT GOOD ITS SO ASS WHAT THE FUCK WHAT WAS WRONG WITH ME???), and eventually got to make even more shitty music (it was good enough for a friend of popular RecTuber "Sk0l" to think it was good enough to be copyrighted) for his new room "Sword_Stars" - a sick ass game where you knock people off a platform to be the last one standing.
and holy shit - I had become a partnered creator with RecRoom. I made $150USD ($220ish AUD at the time) straight into my bank account, just because I made some shitty music and a Discord Bot for a creator on a VR social platform. This was generational. RecRoom slowly died out after that and became a more of a 3rd interest after things like full on web-stack and bot programming and another game "Yeeps" which has a similar formula to RecRoom - but nonetheless RecRoom still always had a place in my heart.
I'd like to thank the following and dedicate Rarchive to them:
The people who brought me to RecRoom:
Hudson
Connor
SquishStudios:
Squish
Trexort
Qadley
Geeked:
CJ
Thomas
Benjamin
Bailey (this cuh was online once when i announced to geeked about the shutdown but sure ill add him here lmao)
Fellas I met along the way:
Emi / @PO.VR
Osakanator/Cascade
netty
The other Thomas (realttte)
Thank you all for making RecRoom a truly special place for me <3
Hat