VR trumps 3D in terms of game design challenges, says Crash Bandicoot dev

- Naughty Dog co-founder and current Oculus worldwide studios chief Jason Rubin.

What's more challenging than captaining THQ or developing Crash Bandicoot? Designing VR games, according to comments made by Jason Rubin onstage at the recent GamesBeat 2015 event.

Rubin has been serving as head of worldwide studios at Oculus for a little over a year now, and his GamesBeat chat with game industry personality Geoff Keighley touches on some intriguing details about how Rubin perceives his role at Oculus in relation to game developers -- and how it in turn sees game developers tackling VR in much the same way they once embraced technology like smartphones or 3D rendering.

"It took us a year of R&D to get to the point where we created Crash. A lot of what we did was determined by the hardware we were dealing with," said Rubin. "How do we make a character action game in 3D? How do we move that character action game into VR? [It's] very similar. I got that feeling that I hadn’t had since Crash Bandicoot – discovering the new."

Rubin goes on to highlight how he tries to sell developers on VR by pointing out that developers working on VR games right now are much akin to those who jumped into mobile games early, and were therefore in a better position to capitalize on the "mobile gold rush" that many believe has come and gone.

"'Remember when touch games first came out and people said it would never work?' A lot of the industry just ignored it, but a few developers decided to jump in at a time when nobody knew if there was a business there. Some of them became Rovio," said Rubin. "There was a lot of trial and error at Rovio, a lot of failed games before they hit Angry Birds. What they learned gave them the ability to get there. We’re now into multiple generations of learning and getting ahead. [VR] is the single largest learning curve I’ve ever seen in games."

His comments echo what many developers are experiencing as they try to unlearn rules of game design to work in VR and establish new ways of tackling common VR game design challenges.