Words With Friends Co-Creator Making an Oculus Rift-Exclusive Game

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June 4, 2014

The next game from the man who co-created the massively popular mobile game Words With Friends is an Oculus Rift-exclusive. Paul Bettner announced today that his new studio, Playful Corp., will launch a third-person platforming adventure game called "Lucky's Tale" exclusively for the virtual reality headset. The game will be on display next week during E3 2014.

Lucky's Tale comes to Oculus Rift thanks to a partnership between Playful Corp. and Oculus VR. With the move, Playful Corp. becomes one of the first game studios to officially align with Oculus to make content exclusively for the VR device, now owned by social networking giant Facebook.

"Virtual reality--I mean truly accurate, comfortable virtual reality--is the most important thing to happen to interactive entertainment in decades," Bettner said in a statement. "I know it sounds like exaggeration, but it's impossible to explain what this is like to someone who hasn't experienced it for themselves. Your brain is convinced that you are somewhere else, that you are in another world. I have worked my entire career to get to this moment, to create something like this."

Words With Friends Co-Creator Making an Oculus Rift-Exclusive Game — The Playful Corp. team

Bettner's studio, founded in January 2013 as Verse Inc., is made up of not only some of the core designers of Words With Friends, but also developers who have worked on major franchises like Halo Wars, Starcraft, and Age of Empires.

"Oculus is committed to bringing the best and most innovative content from developers large and small to our new platform. We are delighted with our new partnership with Playful," Oculus VR publishing boss David De Martini said.

Lucky's Tale is one of two titles Playful is currently working on. The other game is called Creativerse, described as an open-world sandbox game. It will come to the Oculus Rift after initially debuting on Steam later this year. Oculus Rift remains an in-development prototype, and there's no word yet on when the final, consumer version will be available or what it will cost.

Oculus VR is also facing a lawsuit from Elder Scrolls and Fallout parent publisher ZeniMax, accusing Oculus VR of "illegally misappropriating ZeniMax trade secrets relating to virtual reality technology, and infringing ZeniMax copyrights and trademarks." Oculus VR says the suit has no merit.