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Based in Los Angeles, Modal’s story begins with a very intentional meeting between Crawford and Bushnell three years ago on the set of a show Crawford was trying to get greenlit called “App Wars”.
A longtime app developer, Crawford was also a huge fan of Bushnell’s work (although really… who isn’t? He’s the freaking inventor of Atari).
“Most normal kids were fans of baseball stars or music stars, but my brother and I were nerds and our heroes were Nolan Bushnell and Steve Wozniak,” Crawford told me.
So when he had the opportunity to set up a panel of judges for an app-development game show, he insisted that Bushnell be among them.
The pilot didn’t get picked up, but Crawford sought out Bushnell and pitched him on his idea for a new virtual reality company.
Three years ago, in the time before the Oculus Rift acquisition, the VR landscape was still very much in flux, and while Crawford had an idea, his company didn’t yet have the hardware nailed down. Bushnell agreed to advise, consult, and eventually came on board as co-founder.
“We were going to do a thirty-minute lunch and it was a two-and-a-half hour lunch,” Crawford says of that initial meeting.
Bushnell joined about a year ago, but Crawford and his team had been banging away at the technology for much longer. “We failed miserably in a lot of ways for years, doing this,” says Crawford.
The company chief executive actually began working on Modal’s tech almost as soon as he saw the Oculus Rift Kickstarter campaign. “I said, ‘Wait a second. This is the perfect time to come back to VR.’ I think this is going to be huge and I want to be a part of it.”
The company initially started out with Crawford’s idea for a destination. “It was going to be a place where you going to be able to fully immerse yourself,” he said.
At the Machinima studios, that’s exactly what I saw. The back room was kind of a skunkworks area for most of the Machinima staff, who hadn’t seen what the company was up to. In a roughly 3,000 square foot room, staff had been playing Pong using Modal’s technology against each other.
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Developers can use the hardware, or simply develop applications for Modal and sell them through Modal’s own version of an app store. Crawford’s seen how tough it is for game developers to make any money (he was one for a long time before starting Modal), so Modal is his way of opening developers up to novel uses for the tech they’re working on.
“Instead of making a $3 million app, why don’t you think about solving problems for police,” he said.
Ideally, app developers can port their skillsets for gaming to start solving problems that businesses have, that virtual reality could help solve, and that could be very lucrative businesses for the entrepreneurs that develop the tools to solve those problems.
Modal intends to make money from the sale of its hardware as well as taking a cut from the sales of whatever applications are made for its platform.
“It’s going to be very similar to an apple ecosystem,” says Crawford. “Nolan’s vision for this is like the Atari 2600… you open the box, you plug it in and you start using it.”
The company has already developed a suite of games and tools that show off the capabilities of the system. I mentioned Pong, but perhaps the one that seems the most impressive is its VR battle game called “Mythic Combat”, which is like a fully realized version of the discus battle game from Tron.
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Source: TechCrunch