Muse sought to create a whole world around their latest album, Simulation Theory, through their music videos, live show, album art, and the songs themselves. We worked closely with Muse to develop 3 custom VR games inspired by the band’s latest album and music videos. Each was built using the Windows Mixed Reality platform: Retrograde Racer is a driving game, featuring the track “The Dark Side.” Simulation Striker is a beat-match game, using the song “Algorithm.” And shoot-em-up game Spaceship Defender features the track “Algorithm.” It was important to tap into the ‘80s aesthetic of the album art and videos in order to create a cohesive world across media that fans could understand and experience. The games are housed in retro-inspired arcade cabinets, expanding on the aesthetic. These traveled with the band on their world tour, as part of Muse’s Enhanced Experience pre-show for superfans.

Working with Microsoft and two independent VR game developers (and with creative oversight by Muse), we built three different VR games in Unity, running on Windows Mixed Reality, and communicating to a locally networked scoreboard. There is 1 custom scoreboard per game that tracks the highest scorers. Each game is the length of one of Muse’s songs: Retrograde Racer is played to the soundtrack of "The Dark Side" and utilizes a Thrustmaster TMX Pro Force Feedback Racing Wheel to control the car; Simulation Striker is played to the soundtrack of "Algorithm" and uses both hand controllers provided by the Samsung Headset; Spaceship Defender is played to the soundtrack of “Simulation Theory" and uses only one of the hand controllers from the Samsung set. We built 9 retro-style arcade cabinets (3 per game), plus 1 unifying high scoreboard cabinet to tour with the band. Each cabinet consists of 1 55” 4k teelvision, 1 custom-built gaming computer running Windows 10, one Samsung HMD Odyssey+ Headset. There was a 3-month development cycle for all three games; user testing was ongoing throughout the development cycle, but there was more an extra round of testing featuring users without VR experience, to ensure that the games were widely accessible. The Enhanced Experience traveled to 49 tour stops with 14K people estimated to attend the Enhanced Experience from February – July 2019. The campaign ran across Microsoft social channels, Microsoft owned and operated placements, and Muse channels from February 23rd – April 13th 2019. Our campaign generated over 20 million impressions, 3 million+ video views, and over 150 million earned media impressions.