Remnant Protocol will take us back to the age of sci-fi spaceflight sims as it launches in VR on the Meta Quest Store and on Steam in the fourth quarter.
The virtual reality game is a space flight sim with a strategy layer that puts you in command of a galactic rebellion. The game was teased a couple of years ago on Steam on the PC as a 2D screen title, but now it is coming out on VR first. On the PC, you’ll be able to play it as a 2D screen game or on VR if you like.
The game is from Progenitor Game Studios, a small, independent team of sci-fi nerds and combat sim enthusiasts based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. They built Remnant Protocol as a love letter to games like TIE Fighter, X-Wing, and Elite Dangerous, with a narrative twist rooted in rebellion, politics, and power. I’m pretty nostalgic about the flight sims of the past like Wing Commander and Rebel Assault, and I wish I could break out the flightsim joystick more often.
Time to pull out?
The game has been out on Steam on the PC for a couple of years on 2D screens, but now it’s going into VR. And now it has a publishing partner for VR with Meta. With more than 51 million VR headsets in the market (Statista), VR is becoming a viable market for smaller game makers.
Scott McCallum, creative director on Remnant Protocol, started Progenitor Game Studios a few years ago, after moving the game from a hobby to a professional pursuit. “We put out an announcement teaser on Reddit and YouTube,” McCallum said in an exclusive interview with GamesBeat. “And Coray Seifert (a developer relations manager at Meta) reached out to us through DMs on Reddit. He said, ‘Hey, I’m Corey. I work at Meta. This looks really cool. Send me an email.”
McCallum and his devs thought it was B.S. But Seifert gave a legit Meta email and so they started talking. Seifert handed them off to the publishing team. And 11 months later, after a rigorous greenlighting process, they had a deal.
“And since then, we’ve just been full time on this. We go as hard as we can now as we’ve got the financial backing. We could quit our day jobs. It’s truly living the little dream for a little guy like me,” he said.
The studio has five people now.
“We’re more or less been bootstrapping this since the beginning, and now that we have money, we brought on a 2D artist and …