The next entry in the Arvore’s nostalgic VR gaming series, Pixel Ripped 1995, is on its way to the Oculus Quest store soon. But the original game in the series isn’t.
Pixel Ripped 1995 was listed on the Oculus Store last week with its spring 2020 release window. As with the first game, the sequel sees you playing through an entry in a fictional videogame series on a virtual screen, while juggling playtime with ‘real’ life out in the wider virtual world. Whereas 1989 paid tribute to the Gameboy, 1995 is a love letter to the SNES era of gaming.
Pixel Ripped 1989 Oculus Quest Port Stalls
But, given that 1995 is on its way to Quest, you’d expect 1989 to show up on the platform too, right? Well, apparently not; earlier this year developer Ana Ribeiro revealed that the original game had not been approved for sale on the Oculus Quest store. Ribeiro explained that the developer couldn’t release the game on the store without Facebook’s approval and that it had “done what we could in our end”.
Facebook set a tighter curation policy in place with the launch of Oculus Quest last year. The point, it reasoned, was to nurture a more curated store of high-quality content that wasn’t clogged up with shovelware. The decision was met with a lot of criticism for developers and fans alike. Some developers, like the team behind Crisis VRigade, have instead turned to sideloading platform, SideQuest, as a result. In fact, Crisis passed 50,000 downloads on the platform last week.
However, given 1995 was already approved for release on the Oculus Store, we reached out to Facebook on the case. The company offered this statement: “”Pixel Ripped 1995 is an exciting game coming soon to Quest. We don’t comment on individual app submissions to the store, but as we’ve said in the past we’re focused on bringing high-quality, full-featured, and substantial apps to the Quest store.”
Even with the tighter restrictions, it’s strange that Oculus would approve one entry in a popular series for Quest release, but not another. There is always a chance that Pixel Ripped 1989 does end up on Oculus Quest eventually, but it looks like fans will have to sit tight for now.
