To you or me, VR gaming may have quietly died away a few years back, after everyone played Half-Life: Alyx and had their fill of Beat Saber. But to the mysterious collective known as Gen Alpha, the format is alive and well and occupying everything. At the beginning of this year we told you about Gorilla Tag and its massive audience who were all simultaneously under the shared delusion that the game is haunted. But that’s old hat now, because now we have a new game you’ve almost certainly never heard of with a colossal audience: the mighty UG.
UG bears a lot of similarities with G-Tag, but it’s not nearly as brazen a copy as it might first appear. The older game is all about being a gorilla, and—well—playing tag. It’s a lot more involved than that, not least because of all the bloody in-app cosmetic purchases, but the key thing is that it’s a game that brilliantly understood how to make free first-person movement work in a VR game without causing nausea or discombobulating incongruence. The trick is to make the player avatar into a creature with two long arms, but no legs, propelled around by the instinctive action of pulling yourself along the ground. This works for climbing and bouncing too, resulting in a way to navigate the large, vertically interesting levels as an ape. UG, rather smartly, just copies this wholesale. Except here (even though everyone just looks like gorillas wearing thongs), you’re playing as a bizarro-world caveman, co-existing with dinosaurs who can be hatched from eggs, raised, saddled, and ridden upon. But most importantly: swapped.
My window into this peculiar world is my now 11-year-old son, for whom we bought a Meta Quest 3A last Christmas. He’s an only child, and it seemed like a great way for him to play active games with his friends even when he’s at home. And it is! Damn, the muscles he’s built flinging his body around as he plays Gorilla Tag rather put pay to all those tiresome complaints about gaming making kids sedentary. After nearly a year of on-and-off phases of playing the game, about three weeks ago a G-Tag playing friend told him he needed to install something new, called UG, and to do it with some matter of urgency. However, because every electronic item he owns is locked down to the point of being brick-like without my permissions, he then came begging to me. I checked it over, thought it looked like yet another Gorilla Tag knock-off he’d bounce off in a couple of days like all the others, but given it was free, I said sure.
Our lives are now very much about prying him free of his headset for brief moments in which he’s not attempting to feed chickens to an ever-growing menagerie of dinosaurs. For him and squillions of kids around the world, UG has become a big deal.
© ContinuumXR / Kotaku
Quite why is really very fascinating to me, a dad looking on in bemusement (often directly, via the mobile app, where I’m instructed to cast his game to my phone so I can see the new additions to his prehistoric collection). Because while Gorilla Tag has a central game around which everything else is built (tag), UG does not. It’s instead a similarly designed series of large, open spaces, where players can take dinos they’ve collected to help them level up by feeding them food. Right now this food is either comically prehistoric-looking chickens or pigs, which you hold in front of your dinosaur’s foot to have it magically pop into cooked ribs and drumsticks (yes, chicken ribs and pork drumsticks), which you then feed to the beast’s mouth. As it eats its gains XP, and at level 5 will have a sudden growth spurt and become large enough to “buy” a saddle for (with in-game Bones), and then you can ride it around as your mount. There are large dinosaur bosses to fight, with very small chances of a victory seeing an egg drop as loot, but that’s about it. This is, instead, all about the trading.
I should mention, there very much are in-app purchases for both cosmetics and special versions of the imaginary dinosaurs that inhabit the game, and this sucks big-time. We’ve had full-on rows over my son’s belief that $30 is a very reasonable price for a bundle, because bought separately they’d cost so much more. “THEY’RE PICTURES THAT DON’T COST ANYTHING TO MAKE!” I’ve yelled in exasperation, waving my arms around and adding things like, “YOU’RE TRYING TO SPEND TWENTY-FIVE POUNDS ON DRAWINGS THAT DON’T EVEN EXIST!” I don’t understand. I’m an old fool who just doesn’t get it. And it’s his money, so how is it any of my business! And so on. But that aside, there are various ways to get your own dinosaurs without paying, primary among them swapping something you have for something someone else has.
To this end, the game’s main hub area has trading tables on which players can place up to five creatures they’re willing to exchange, and then each pulls a lever to seal the deal. And watching this is extraordinary. Imagine the trading floor of a financial market, but with pre-pubescent voices. It’s frantic and furious, with stakes constantly being raised as multiple people on the server start trying to outbid a player for their especially interestingly patterned version of a Grugadon. And often, this is before the kid has even suggested they’re interested in trading, just happening to have stomped by while riding their proudest dino. My son has often had to escape to a private instance (you dial a random four-digit code into a machine to do this) to get away from marauding crowds trying to scream over each other for his electric-blue Triskeletops.
© ContinuumXR / Kotaku
The game also demonstrates plenty of the peculiar conspiratorial nonsense that pervades Gorilla Tag. Because, guys, have you heard, Mammothors are getting deleted tomorrow? No, seriously, they’re pulling them from the game. You see, this admin leaked them before he was supposed to, and now they’re taking them all out of the game. This was the BIG story the week before last, and I’d hear kids talking about it (a weird thing about the Meta Quest headset is you can hear everything if you’re in the same room, but they can’t hear you when you mock them from the couch) no matter how many different servers my kid was on. Via the magic of checking the Discord (that just recently celebrated 100,000 members), I discovered that absolutely no dinosaurs are being deleted (clearly the rumors had spread far enough that there was a need to publicly respond), and then hilariously enough, come November’s post-Halloween update, Mammothors have become the focus. Every nonsensical memetic belief seems to be based around these spurious “admins,” not least the wild theories that everyone seems to believe about “duping,” based on a bug that was eliminated from the game over a month before. It’s fascinating to observe how these rumors evolve and spread, formed from nothing at all, and how hard it can be to dispel any one of these beliefs.
But as inaccessibly weird as it all appears to me, there is a vast audience out there, and it’s growing fast. There have been an awful lot of attempts to muscle in on the success of Gorilla Tag in the three years since it released, perhaps most successfully by an extremely similar game called Animal Company that, earlier this year, became the most popular game on the Meta store. But most others come and go as the obvious knock-offs they are. UG is doing something different, however. It’s been sitting at the top of the Meta charts for weeks now, and while the perennial hit Beat Saber still sits in second, it’s Animal Company that’s third, while Gorilla Tag has been dethroned to fourth place. This really seems to suggest the caveman game is siphoning players directly from G-Tag‘s audience. It’s interesting to note that 2022’s gorilla game has amassed 164,000 ratings over the last three years, while UG already has acquired 163,000 in just the three months since it released.
But these games have mercurial audiences, and at any moment UG could become last month’s thing, forgotten in the pile of free-to-play games inside the headset, as everyone moves on to the next near-identical thing. And we, the people who think we’re the normal game players, will likely not even know any of it is happening.
