From Viral to Vast: Another Axiom’s Journey from Gorilla Tag to Orion Drift

In 2021, Kerestell Smith (LemmingVR) released a little big monke game and a bold locomotion experiment called Gorilla Tag onto Steam and App Lab. This was followed quickly by a Meta Horizon Store launch in 2022, which changed the game for VR.

The game quickly went viral, and with over $100M in revenue primarily from in-game purchases and a dedicated community of over 10M unique users, Gorilla Tag proves what’s possible when you intentionally build around community and connection.

Now operating as Another Axiom, the studio is focused on its next major project, Orion Drift. Made up of veterans from Ready at Dawn and the creators of Echo VR, the team is known for building expansive virtual playgrounds, pushing the limits of physicality, and betting big on community. Inspired by the team’s love and admiration for Echo VR, Orion Drift is a bold take on multiplayer social VR, built for movement, immersion and scale. And it’s already resonating with players, climbing into the top 25 most popular games on Meta Quest, as of writing.

We spoke with Studio Design Director Jonathan Hamel and Design Lead Patrick Lipo about how Gorilla Tag shaped their design philosophy, why Orion Drift is their most ambitious project to date and what other developers can take away from their process.

One of the studio’s biggest learnings from Gorilla Tag was the power of launching early and shaping the game with real feedback. “We believe firmly in launching features early and often, frequently in an unpolished state, and in polishing and iterating on them with the community, based on what they care about,” said Hamel.

That mindset carried into Orion Drift, where the team started with Closed Early Access followed by Open Early Access. “Although the way we did it for Orion Drift changed, a huge takeaway from Gorilla Tag’s early development was to work closely with players who care about what we’re doing, and to get the community involved and playing as early as possible."

A limitation in Gorilla Tag’s design inspired a major shift in Orion Drift. “The matchmaking system of Gorilla Tag separates people as they move from map to map,” said Hamel. “On Orion Drift, we responded to that challenge in a fundamentally different way. We prioritized building a large space with a high player count so that people feel they are part of a world, not just a map.”

That design philosophy led to the Orion Array, a massive orbital station with multiple zones: Driftball arenas, a parkour district, social hubs and zero-gravity areas. This environment reflects Another Axiom’s roots in games like Echo VR and Lone Echo, which several members helped build during their time at Ready At Dawn.

“We’ve created a space station that highlights our arena sport, Driftball, as well as a sprawling playground of physical challenges to satisfy the skills of climbers, freerunners and skaters,” said Lipo. “We’re always building new experiences that take advantage of our unique combination of physical movement mechanics.”

The success of Gorilla Tag taught the team that player demand should drive platform scale. “One of the most frequent bits of community feedback we hear is to increase the player count from 10 per server in Gorilla Tag,” said Hamel. “Given the opportunity to create a whole new world and game without Gorilla Tag’s constraints, we wanted to scale that up.”

With Orion Drift, Hamel explained how that goal became concrete. “A living, breathing world of 200 players per station is our goal. We’re well on our way, with the current 75 players per station.”

The desire to scale began with their community roots. “We showed up at the Echo VR Sunset Cup and hosted a party to validate the idea of throwing our hat in the ring,” said Hamel. “The response was overwhelming.” That feedback led to a second event in Las Vegas, where passionate Echo VR community members got to test an early build of what was then known as A2. “Those face-to-face playtests helped confirm we were building something worth continuing.”

Embodied movement is at the heart of Another Axiom’s games. “Step 1 was to get hand-based locomotion playtestable ASAP,” said Hamel. But that required overcoming real constraints, like translating soft-body physics from Echo VR into Unity’s rigid-body system.

To solve that, the team built custom server tools that allowed real-time, in-headset iteration. “We could meet inside the game, tweak mechanics and feel the changes immediately without removing our headsets or dropping out of multiplayer,” said Hamel.

An internal game jam led to one of Orion Drift’s most ambitious systems: The Orion Ring, a massive circular rail that enables fast travel between districts and supports zero G and low G environments. “Accepting that our MVP needed to accommodate multiple kinds of gravity and was kind of crazy in terms of scope was an enormous step,” said Hamel.

Once again, community validation also reinforced their core design values. “Feedback helped us believe that our axioms—hand-based locomotion, plausible alternate reality and social togetherness—are the right foundation for XR games,” said Hamel.

Orion Drift is built to evolve one match, fleet and player suggestion at a time. For Another Axiom, players aren’t just participants, they’re partners. “[Each] fleet is an opportunity to tweak rules, organize matches or host their own special events,” said Lipo. “We are actively refining Driftball, building new arenas and working to get players into great matches while still keeping it easy for anyone to drop in, play and watch.”

That same spirit of ongoing improvement applies to Scraprun, Orion Drift’s obstacle course mode. “One of the events players should keep an eye on is Scraprun,” said Lipo. “We’re working on a big update with new courses, new traps and more robot mayhem.”

Released in invite-only early access in October 2024, Orion Drift has already amassed over 4.6K reviews on the Meta Horizon Store. The excitement from its early player community makes it clear that what Another Axiom got right with Gorilla Tag wasn’t a fluke, and can be repeated.

While Orion Drift is more ambitious and complex than anything the studio has built before, its guiding principle is simple: “Start with what players care about,” said Hamel. “Then build the world around them.”

For more developer news, stories and product updates, follow us on X and Facebook, and subscribe to our monthly newsletter in your Developer Dashboard settings.