Great news, number crunchers and spreadsheet slayers, the accounting app for you is finally on its way to VR. William Pugh (who worked on The Stanley Parable) and Dominik Johann of Crows Crows Crows have partnered up with Justin Roiland, co-creator and voice of popular animated series Rick and Morty, to make a big splash in the enterprise accounting software market.
I had a chance to speak with them at GDC about their inspiring creation, and though I’ve yet to have any hands or eyes on with it myself, their mysterious VR accounting app sounds like the perfect addition to the burgeoning VR market. The idea cropped up surprisingly early in a VR jam the group set up last week.
“The answer was clear after a few hours of discussion,” says Roiland. Then all three in unison, unrehearsed, “Accounting.”
Noticing a lack of VR games built for corporate number smiths, the group set out to find a way to bring a typically lackluster job into a new age, specifically by simulating the job itself as accurately as possible. Roiland explains: “The one thing we felt was, you know, accounting jobs are boring. So we were like, we’re in the early stages of VR, there’s going to be a real need for people who sit at a desk and look at Excel spreadsheets, how can we make that more interesting by putting it in a VR office?”
But when I prodded the VR thinktank about Job Simulator, a VR demo that simulates and lampoons every corporate job out there, Pugh flustered and defended his ideas.
“It’s set in an office, and I know we’re going to get a lot of comparisons to Job Simulator, but I don’t like that because Job Simulator makes me really angry,” says Pugh. “It doesn’t accurately simulate the jobs. We don’t want to do it and have it not be an accurate depiction of accounting, because that’s just offensive. To accountants.”
Without wanting to make too many promises, the team assured me that it will work with both older and newer versions of Excel, and will attempt to simulate an actual corporate accounting cubicle as accurately as possible. I have to assume they're pulling my leg. But maybe not.
So if you need some accounting help, open up those project planning speadsheets and highlight crowscrowscrows.com in green (or whatever color aligns with your workflow), and sign up for the newsletter, where the project will initially release. Also check out our interview with Justin Roiland from last year, in which he said he's more motivated to make VR games than anything else.
