Sony Pictures’ Jake Zim talks about the new Zombieland VR game and how to turn existing IP into amazing VR content

Hello Jake, can you please introduce yourself to my readers?

I’m Jake Zim, Senior Vice President of Virtual Reality at Sony Pictures Entertainment. I oversee our virtual reality business. Here at Sony Pictures, we publish VR games and experiences across all platforms. Of course, we are close to our PlayStation partners, but we also publish on Oculus Quest and PCVR. We always try to focus on leveraging our Intellectual Property, like Jumanji, and Ghostbusters to bring new IP and experiences to the community in a way that is familiar to them but also pushes creative and technological limits.

Just to clarify, what is Sony Pictures Entertainment and how is it different from Sony Pictures Interactive Entertainment?

I work at Sony Pictures Entertainment. which is the movie studio. We focus on movies and TV. PlayStation, that is Sony Interactive Entertainment, is another division. We are all part of the same Sony Group and work closely together, but we are two different divisions.

When Virtual Reality started to become a commercial product, with the first PSVR, Vive and Rift CV1, the idea was to take our worlds from movies and TVs and transform them into virtual reality experiences. As storytellers, we thought it was a great idea to bring IPs like Spider-Man, full of characters and worlds people love, into this new platform. It was a way to introduce VR, something that was initially niche, to the broader entertainment audience with familiar stories and characters they already loved.

One of the amazing movies that you are porting to VR is Zombieland. Can you describe it and tell us how you decided to port it to VR?

Zombieland is a perfect example of our process. We have two amazing Zombieland movies and we thought: is there a fantasy about living in Zombieland’s world that can be delivered only through VR? In the crazy world of Zombieland you have to survive hordes of zombies together with crazy characters, so the ideal would be to blast zombies that want to attack you. We wondered if we could fulfill this fantasy and we worked hard with the talented group of developers at XR Games to make that a reality. We developed a game that is like a time crisis game, it’s an arcade-style shooter and a speedrun game, where you have to shoot zombies as fast as you can. We launched it on Quest some weeks ago, and it’s doing fantastically well: the reviews are great, people love being inside the world of Zombieland, they are asking for more content, and they love the replayability of the game.

In your opinion, what is the game’s greatest selling point?

First of all, it’s a game that is very easy to pick up and play. There are loads of fantastic games made for in-depth users, with complex mechanics. But for the IP, we wanted a game that was accessible for everyone. We wanted a game that was easy to play.

Another key selling point is it is a pure shooter… it’s frenetic, it’s fun, it’s crazy.  It has an adrenaline system that if you nail two headshots in a row, the game slows down, so you can up your accuracy and hopefully achieve a better score. There is competition between players thanks to leaderboards where everyone competes for the top spot. So it is fun, it is accessible, it has cool mechanics, and it has a competitive nature that we love.

The main critic towards your game is that it is the nth VR zombie wave shooter game. What do you answer to these critics? Why do you think your game is special?

We think that the brand is a really important feature here. We don’t want to compete with the other cool zombie games: this is not a crafting or survival game. It is a speedrun shooter, but most importantly, this is Zombieland. We wanted to make sure that the movie brand was felt in the game. We worked with the writers of the movie, we made sure that the dialogue in the game was in tone with the comedy of the movie.  We spent time finessing the likenesses of the game characters to that of the movie actors and most importantly, we kept the signature sardonic humor. Sure, you’re shooting zombies, but it’s all in comedy, not self-serious horror. We wanted to stand out by being authentic to the brand itself.

Who do you think is the typical player of this game?

The primary target is the hardcore VR enthusiast, players who love fun, repeatable games, and frenetic shooter games. The secondary target is the fans of the brand. I believe it’s part of our job to grow the VR user base by making great games based on famous brands. When I read the reviews on the Quest Store and there are people that say that they were fans of the movie, tried the game, and found it better than they expected, that is so satisfying. That’s our goal.

The third target are competitive gamers. The leaderboards really stoke the social competition that’s burgeoning in VR. Seeing your name at the top of the charts motivates players to keep coming back to a game now just as it did back in the arcade.

How is it difficult to port a movie to VR and how do you perform that?

That is our secret sauce and the core question we have to answer. We take a TV series or a movie with a linear format and we transform it into a fully-immersive experience that gives agency to the user and the addictive interactivity of a game. We have a process we developed over time and in the end, it distills down to one question: “Is there a core fantasy that we can deliver to the audience that would be compelling”? Think about Ghostbusters (which we did in VR, and for which we will continue producing VR content), the core fantasy is busting ghosts: it is so fun to do in VR, you can do it with your friends, and it is even a bit scary, so it’s perfect. For every IP we have, we go through a list of 20 questions to try to understand if there is a core fantasy that can be ported to VR and if the answer to these questions is yes, then we develop the game. If not, we move on to different IP.

For Zombieland, the answer was a clear yes: the core fantasy is being in the world, surviving, and killing zombies together with the characters from the movie.

Zombieland is a movie about zombies, but it is also funny. How have you managed to keep this same atmosphere in the game? What is the process in general to port a movie to VR?

After we decide the core fantasy, we talk about immersion. If the expectation of the players is horror, stylized violence, fun, like in Zombieland… we have to implement them in the game. The benefit of being at Sony and Sony Pictures is that we can work closely with the teams that made the movies. Early in the process I contacted Ruben Fleischer, the director of Zombieland, and asked him what the core DNA of the movie was. Then we talked with the producers, the movie’s writers, the visual FX group, the whole creative production team…  to ensure we honored as much of the brand essence of the movie as possible. We worked with the writers of the Zombieland movie marketing campaign to have them help write the character dialogue for our VR game so that we felt very connected with the spirit of its brand. So we try to understand everything about the brand of the movie we are porting, and then we look for ways to make it not only interactive, but also immersive. And this means asking: what does this brand mean in terms of art style? What interactions can you have with the characters? How should the marketing materials be prepared? All of these things are not only in the production schedule but also inside the risk assessment: what happens if we can’t nail this or that feature? This is all part of the fun of the process… and eventually, we deliver something that people love.

How can people buy Zombieland?

Right now you can buy it on the Oculus Quest, and the ratings are great. We are shipping on PSVR and PC later on. We should have some announcements about the timing coming soon. For now, get it on the Quest Store, and make sure to get your name in the leaderboards.

There is some additional content coming, a new competitive campaign, and announcements for it all coming soon. But for now, go and get it from the Quest Store!

Let’s talk about your main job, that is using famous IPs in VR. You have worked already with Groundhog Day, Ghostbusters, Spider-Man, and now Zombieland. What is your favorite VR experience and why?

You know, we have this general saying “We love all our children equally”. It’s hard for me to pick a favorite, I actually have many favorite games for different reasons. Because you know, this VR ecosystem has been a journey, a rollercoaster…and there is something exciting at every turn that we make, every game that we ship, every new platform that gets announced. We shipped 17 games on different platforms (PSVR, Quest, PCVR, but also LBVR games, The Void projects, Dave & Buster’s projects, Dreamscape games), and every one of them has a story behind it.

Spiderman is very fun to talk about because the two Spiderman games that we shipped have done amazingly well in terms of penetration, of copies shipped, and especially of the community response about being able to swing through Manhattan as Spiderman. That was something that in the beginning we were very nervous about. When we shipped our first Spiderman Homecoming game, in 2017, it was a short little experience that introduced web-shooting just to promote the movie, and in the end, there was a little teaser about web-swinging. The community loved it and everyone said that they wanted to swing. We thought “Ok. they want it, let’s give it to them!”. So we made the Far From Home game, which is a bit longer, around 30 minutes, and it is all about web-swinging. And the moment that we saw the response of the community to it, that we made something that the community was asking for, we gave it to them and they loved it, it was amazing for me, my team, and everyone involved.

It signaled to us that this journey goes up and down, but ultimately the community is growing, there’s more appetite for risk, and people want to try new things. With the right developers, we can make experiences that can only get better over time, as the technology and the production pipelines get better. I could tell you amazing stories for each launch of a game, but in the end, it’s all about learning and growth. And now we are at a point that this is a business, and that is the most exciting thing to me. This community is seeing real returns, and developers taking risks are seeing money back, and it is very important… and I’m honored to have played a small part in this.

What has changed in developing VR games during these years?

There are many difficulties in developing games, and they are exacerbated when the hardware is changing so frequently as it is happening in VR. When you get new headsets, new controllers, new standards… and developers have to choose what bet they should take, not knowing where the market is going, it is hard… and we went through it. But now we are in a phase when we now have certain standards, hardware standards, specs, production pipelines built on technological stacks that have been developed already, mechanics that have been proven (like the swinging one or the locomotion mechanics). we are starting to have a base layer upon which the developers can base their work on. And this is thanks to what Oculus has done with its developer ecosystem, and what PlayStation also has done.

So, now developers are working on a tech stack that has already been developed, the hardware devices are solidifying, the game engines now all support virtual reality in a much more robust way, multiplayer protocols have been created, etc… all the key components that feed the developers ecosystem and the consumer experience are starting to standardize. This creates more certainty in the whole development process and lets us (and other studios) create bigger and better games that highlight more of these features that people are familiar with. And this is important for the growth of the ecosystem overall.

How do you envision VR games in 5-10 years?

10 years away is very hard to predict in gaming in general, let alone VR. But in the future, I see multiplayer at scale, something that we have already started seeing in titles like Rec Room, Population: One… and even games that started as single player now are multiplayer like Beat Saber. Multiplayer is growing. There will always be solo campaigns, but the idea of multiplayer especially now that we are so disconnected because of the pandemic is very powerful. Virtual Reality offers something unique in terms of connection that gaming can really touch on. I believe in everything multiplayer, everything social in VR. VR can make you connect with other people in a different way than phones, than desktop games, than console because it brings you into an environment together… and if you add gaming to this mix, and maybe a brand like Ghostbusters or Jumanji, that becomes really exciting.

26:26 How is selling VR games now? Are we at a stage that the market is already interesting for AAA studios?

It’s still a nascent business. There have been big jumps in the last two years, especially thanks to the Oculus Quest, but we are still at the very early stages in a long play. We have to be patient; these are platforms that still need a long time before we can define them mature. We are not there yet. But in the world of gaming, I think the question is “Does VR fit as a niche, or is it its own standalone type of products and experiences?”. I think that for a while it was just a niche, a subset of gaming for a specific type of gamer, but now we are starting to see VR becoming its own entertainment platform.

We’ll have more and more a community of players moving to VR for gaming, social VR, productivity, communication. This means we can have a distinct category of interaction and entertainment that is VR, as supposed to be just a subset of gaming. This allows VR to become more independent. There will always be a strong entertainment component in VR, also thanks to how it has been sold until now, because it is where the money is now, but we are starting to see a bifurcation of the VR ecosystem in a more independent space that includes things like Virtual Desktop (that is selling well almost like Beat Saber)… people are finding ways to be productive in VR. And all of this has been accelerated by the pandemic.

You have worked in the location-based VR sector, collaborating with franchises like The Void and Dreamscape. How is it difficult to work in LBEVR, and how is it different than creating an at-home game like Zombieland?

I’m a huge fan of location-based VR. VR can be very hard to introduce to people for the first time. There’s a saying that “Your first bad VR experience is your last VR experience”. People that had a bad experience in VR most probably won’t put on a headset again. The great thing about The Void, Dreamscape, Hologate, is that they have very curated high-quality experiences, and people that help you in learning how to wear and use a headset, so the user always has a positive experience. And also gives access to VR to people that would have never had access to a Quest or a PSVR headset.

Location Based VR is an important piece of the puzzle to grow the at-home VR ecosystem and the VR ecosystem in general. Unluckily the pandemic shut down location-based entertainment in general, and that is an unfortunate event. However, I think that LBEVR with the right business model will come back, like Hologate and Sandbox are doing. Many LBEVR businesses will come back re-imagined in a new way. When we started with Sony Pictures VR business in 2016, we didn’t realize how location-based VR was going to become important early on, then we made two experiences with Jumanji and Ghostbusters, and we have a couple others we would be very excited to re-roll out. LBEVR can be a very difficult business. We are not there directly; we just make content for it. It’s a very different experience but an important one for the growth of the whole industry.

Is there a different process to port a movie to a LBEVR experience or is it the same as doing an at-home game?

There are some important differences, like throughput of people and business objectives. We always start with the story, though, with the narrative and the core fantasy. For Jumanji, that we made with The Void, the fantasy was “What would you want to be like if you dropped into a video game?” You could be one of the amazing characters that are played by famous actors like The Rock and Jack Black in the movie. Again, we tried to be faithful to the brand. But after that, we had to think about how to make 4 people move across a space of 1000 square feet in 15 minutes. We had to think about what the key thresholds could be, the game design elements, the dialogue… There is a much different creative and technical process to build these kinds of experiences, and it is very fun and very exciting. And the team at The Void was amazing, they knew their stuff very well… it was a great experience, I hope we will be able to launch it again at some point.

Will Zombieland ever have an LBEVR version?

Maybe… that would be fun to do. We built an experience that people are liking at home, and I think it is a brand that has that kind of flexibility, so yeah.

Can you give us some hints about what you are working on for the future?

We have a lot of stuff going on. I can’t tell you anything specific right now, but we have some announcements coming soon. The core area for us is the depth of our catalogue: 4000 different IPs across movies, TV shows, game shows… We are working both on location-based and in-home projects that go deep in our catalogue, and our blockbuster movies that everyone loves.

We are really excited about the commitment that PlayStation has made to next-generation VR, that’s great for the ecosystem. You can bet we will work very closely with our partners at PlayStation for future titles. And we also love working with Oculus, they are fantastic. And the PC market is great, too. The only thing I can tell you is that we have a lot of projects in the works, and we’ll keep focusing on our catalogue, on our IP, and working across all platforms, both in-home and location-based.

You have tremendous experience launching VR games. If you had to tell us VR content creators a lesson that you’ve learned these years, what would it be?

I went to Oculus Connect 2 and Michael Abrash spoke. He is a smart guy and is always one of my favorite speakers at Oculus Connects, because he always talks about the future and the research being done to tackle what is extremely difficult. Anyone who works in VR knows it is hard work, from a hardware standpoint, from a software standpoint… it’s hard to make people understand what VR is and wear a headset. Michael Abrash said something that resonated with me: he said he was going to dedicate the next 10 years of his life to working on VR. This helped me understand this is a long game, a long journey, and it is not going to be easy. But if it was easy, everyone could do it. The best piece of advice I can give to anyone in the ecosystem is: “Be there for the long game”. Recognize this is a growth business, it is not going away, it is just going to grow. And it is an extremely exciting but difficult business. So, stick with it, keep building mechanics, keep building tools, keep solving problems.

I’m going to be in this for the next 10 years of my life, hopefully even more. You should be here for the next 10 years of your life. We should all be here for the next 10 years of our lives. Keep building, keep learning, keep shipping games, keep getting information, keep building your network, keep building bridges with others of the community, it’s a great community with everyone helping the others… and it is only going to get better. So the advice that I give is: play the long game here.

How do you identify a successful indie game studio?

We have a different shade, we want to make games from our IPs, so we need studios that understand the value of our IPs. Not everyone wants to work on someone else’s IP, and I understand that. When working on Zombieland, we wanted the head of product, the artists, everyone, to be excited about working with Zombieland, because we wanted the best product.

At Sony Pictures VR we outsource all our work, we have very important IP, so for us, the most important element is understanding if you are excited about working with our IP, and this means for us to visit the studios and look them in their eyes, talk to people about Jumanji or Zombieland, and get a sense if they are really motivated to work on our IP. Everything else from that on can be figured out: deals, money, timing, etc… but to port a movie to a VR experience we need developers that are motivated to work on that IP, this is where we start.

Is there something else you want to add to this interview?

What I think is ultimately exciting about this space, and you do a lot of this in your blog, is that there are so many different touchpoints that VR can enter into. We are in a crucial moment, the world is changing because of the pandemic, and there are some big disruptions happening in how things are done. People want to go back to schools, movies, restaurants, to travel again in real life, but I also think there is a huge opportunity for digital interactions in immersive categories.

VR has a moment right now, where we are seeing real investments, real M&A activities, but I would also say that this space is unique and for it to be unique we should focus on what VR is good for versus your phone, your computer, versus the real life, and differentiate what VR can offer from everything else. To me it is being in some place you can’t be in real life, like the world of a movie, on a different planet, underwater, in a fantastical place. VR can offer that in a unique way. People in the communities should lean into that consistently, and always answer the question “Why what we are producing is only worth producing because it is in VR?” and I think this is what can drive that success that we want to see in this space.