Starship Commander: Arcade PressKit

Factsheet

Developer:
Human Interact
Based in San Jose, California, USA

Founding date:
January, 2016

Website:
https://www.Human-Interact.com

Press / Business contact:
alexander.mejia@human-interact.com

Social:
Twitter.com/Human_Interact
Youtube.com/HumanInteract
Twitch.tv/HumanInteract

Description

STARSHIP COMMANDER: Arcade is a cinematic, choose-your-own-adventure narrative, inspired by classic PC adventure games like Day of the Tentacle, and Telltale’s Walking Dead series. Go faster-than-light on an adventure through space, as you infiltrate an alien spy facility on a top-secret mission. Powered by the Microsoft Cognitive Services, STARSHIP COMMANDER: Arcade Delivers a new choose-your-own-adventure experience in VR that allows the audience to speak directly and naturally to characters without video gamey dialogue wheels and controls.

History

Want to know more about your ship and lore? Just ask Sergeant Sarah Pearson. Ready to blow things up? Just say “Let’s go.” You command the story, at your pace and with your style, using a next-gen AI system developed in conjunction with Microsoft and Human Interact. The future of adventure games is here.

Command the XR71, the galaxy’s most advanced fighter, on a mission to infiltrate and destroy the Ecknian spy facility at all costs. Your choices and your performance determine the outcome of the story.

Made in Unreal Engine 4, and with outstanding visuals designed by AAA game industry veterans, STARSHIP COMMANDER: Arcade has been meticulously crafted to have a lived-in feel. Mechanical engineers and experienced artists worked hand-in-hand to craft the rich enviroments you will traverse.

Human Interact announced its debut title Starship Commander in February 2017, and was featured on stage at Microsoft Build 2017. On November 28th Human Interact announced Starship Commander: Arcade, an LBE version of Starship Commander, a 15 minute experience which launched only in arcades on December 10th, 2018. Now Starship Commander: Arcade comes home to steam on September 10th, 2020 with Steam Achievements, non-vr mode, and the 52 minutes documentary "Passion At All Costs"

The free DLC included with the game is a 52-minute documentary detailing the tumultuous development cycle of Starship Commander Arcade. In 2015, Adam Nydahl and Alexander Mejia worked together on Crime Watch, a finalist for the Oculus Game Jam in 2015. Co-Founders Alexander Mejia, and Adam Nydahl then changed their focus to STARSHIP COMMANDER, and brought on a third co-founder Sophie Wright to form Human Interact. Their first success with the game was during a closed-door demo at GDC 2016 with the VR industry players. That success culminated in a public reveal for Starship Commander at Microsoft Build 2017 that catapulted the notoriety of the game as the first voice driven, machine learning AI based, narrative game built specifically for VR. In the documentary, Alexander Mejia laments that “We were sold a false narrative that VR is this hardcore gaming platform,” but claims that growing the size of the VR audience will solve issues with the slower than expected growth VR is experiencing today.

In 2015, Alexander Mejia and Adam Nydahl teamed up to create a prototype for a story-driven, interactive, VR experience called Crime Watch. The prototype led to them realizing the potential of pairing natural language processing (“NLP”) with VR as a key differentiator. With the addition of Sophie Wright as COO, Human Interact was formed to turn that potential into NLP games and applications that foucus on speaking directly to chracters using Microsoft's NLP technology in combination with their custom human AI systems. Hence the name, Human Interact.

Team & Repeating Collaborator

Alexander Mejia
Co-Founder & CEO

Sophie Wright
Co-Founder, COO & Actress

Adam Nydahl
CTO

Frank Petreikis
Chief Sound Designer

Byron Evora
Senior Sound Designer

David Kuelz
Lead Writer & Character Designer

Steve Holt
Concept Artist

Larry Gates II
Audio Producer

Sai Narayan
Gameplay Programmer

Jose Vaquez
Concept Artist

Xander Davis
User Interface Artist

Contact

Inquiries
Alexander.mejia@human-interact.com

Twitter
https://twitter.com/Human_Interact

Web
Human-Interact.com