Tommy Palm On Mobile, MR, & the Magic of Multiplayer

This year marks the 10-year anniversary of Reality Labs, and we’re celebrating some of the developers who’ve made the last decade of magic possible. First, we interviewed Jesse Schell, a noted game designer, author, and CEO of Schell Games. Then, we caught up with Polyarc CEO & Co-Founder Tam Armstrong. Next, we sat down with Baobab Studios Co-Founder & CEO Maureen Fan. And today, we’re shining a spotlight on Resolution Games Founder & CEO Tommy Palm.

With its own 10-year anniversary coming up in January 2025, Resolution Games needs little introduction. You may know them as the devs behind Acron: Attack of the Squirrels!, Angry Birds VR: Isle of Pigs, Bait!, Blaston, Cook-Out: A Sandwich Tale, Demeo, Demeo Battles, Racket Club, and the recently released Spatial Ops. Committed to connecting people through games that push the boundaries of what’s possible, we couldn’t pass up the chance to talk shop.

Tommy Palm: I’ve personally always thought that virtual reality would be this next natural step for games where you’re kind of inside the game world. As a game designer, it’s an incredibly exciting opportunity to work with a new frontier. The added dimensions of immersion and presence are incredibly different in virtual reality compared to regular flat screen or pancake games, which is a very exciting thing to explore from a developer’s perspective.

TP: I always loved computers, personally. I was just drawn to them. I think it’s such an interesting idea of a thinking machine. I was playing a lot of role-playing games with my friends at that time, like Dungeons & Dragons. I always felt that the rule sets could be simplified so much by a computer. So that’s one of the core things that made me really want to get into programming and making games—so that you could have that incredible experience that you had in role-playing games with your friends.

It’s been a very interesting journey in regards to how difficult it has been to bring that to fruition. I think very few people have managed to capture that social experience you can have with a board game with friends. The game is just a tool for you to hang out and do something together. You just have tons of fun. It’s not until now, with virtual reality, that I feel we can get close to capturing that. Demeo is a great example of that incredible sense of presence and feeling like you’re together with other people even though you’re miles apart.

TP: Well, I got one of the Oculus development kits, and I felt that this was extremely exciting because now there was finally hardware that would be coming out to consumers, so I thought it was a very good opportunity in time. And by then, I had already started four other companies in the game space, so I had some experience. I think to a large degree, game design is similar no matter what platform you’re on. It’s a lot about making it simple for people to love your game, and then get interested and want to do more and tell their friends about this experience that they had and that they can hopefully have tons of fun with. I’ve always personally been most interested in multiplayer games and the social aspect of gaming.

With my first games, I tried single-player, and then I did kind of the same single-player game just for my friends so we could compete. It became 10 times as fun without the additional effort and having to build all of that because it was local multiplayer on the same machine back then in the ’80s. I think the same is true today, right? If you experience something that is deeply fun and engaging, if you do that socially, it is extremely much more interesting. We’re very social beings. We like to do things with other people and talk about it with them afterwards.

I think one of the big promises with both VR and AR or XR that’s coming up is to be able to easily feel like we’re together with other people. I do think that there’s a lot of groups in a society that struggle with loneliness where something like this can be super, super helpful. Both teenagers and older people could benefit from it.

TP: Well, in the beginning, there was just not an opportunity to make multiplayer because there weren’t enough people in the ecosystem. So we started making games like Bait! that could be social eventually, and now we’ve actually added a multiplayer component to it. But it was an experience we wanted to make—kind of close to nature, rather calm. A lot of people were doing shooters and things like that. It felt to me like there was so much going on. You’re learning a new platform, and it’s better in the beginning to start with something that is calmer—where you’re sitting still and taking in this new world. And then we moved on to more and more multiplayer with Acron: Attack of the Squirrels!

One person is in VR, with the other people joining through phones. So even though there wasn’t concurrency back then in 2017, this was a way to get to that party experience where you could jump in your headset and still have the rest of the family join in. That was one of the most fun projects we worked on. Everybody who was involved wants to kind of go back and make more of those asynchronous multiplayer experiences. We’ve just never had the right time. And since then, we progressed to more concurrent online multiplayer games like Demeo and some of our upcoming titles, like Home Sports, which will launch this year and is a collection of fun social sports, available for the first time in mixed reality. You’re there together with other people, either your friends or random people online, and that works extraordinarily well.

We’ve been working with game designer Mike Booth—that’s been a really magical experience where it feels like, even though he’s in California and we’re here in the cold north of Sweden, which actually has a nice sunny day today for a change, it feels like you’re just there together in the same room, and it’s incredible.

TP: When we started, we instantly said that one of the reasons why VR is exciting is that it shares a lot of technical components with augmented reality. We thought that augmented reality is going to be much bigger in the sense that it’s going to be used for many more types of use cases than only gaming or education and things like that. You could theoretically walk around with it, and it could replace your smartphone. And so we started quite early, I think somewhere around 2017 or 2018, with augmented reality games. Since then, we’ve made quite a few games that have an augmented reality mode, and we make decisions based on what games we were doing next. One of the parameters there is: Does it also work in augmented reality? Take a game like Racket Club, where you can perfectly have the bot standing in your living room and you can play with it, and you can still be fully aware of your surroundings, which is really helpful sometimes, especially when you’re demoing the game. You bring it down to a busy place, and it’s really helpful to be able to still look at people’s faces and talk to them.

TP: Oh, wow, that’s a hard one. But one of the things that I think about instantly is the fact Quest 2 launched at a more consumer-friendly price point of about $300. I think that has been incredibly helpful. Those who work in this industry are very grateful for that because that allowed for a larger audience and being able to do multiplayer titles more efficiently. So I would say that that’s one of the really big milestones, and it’s maybe not one of the ones that you think about. And we’re looking forward to the same growth or more in the ecosystem with the recent launch of Quest 3S and reduced price point of Quest 3.

The other one that I think is very important to us as a company is having hands and being able to act in the 3D world. It was such a divider there between having the gamepads in the beginning where you had something that was designed for 2D interfaces. I always said that I thought the gaming audience could be so much bigger if it wasn’t for these very abstract buttons. You play a modern game on your console, which looks absolutely amazing—it looks like the physical world—but then you only have these buttons to interact with that world, which is now getting much more exciting with real voice and your actual hands and fingers and that.

TP: The boring answer is that I do think that’s going to be a combination. But I think the way humans mostly interact with our environments is through voice, so I think that’s going to be a very, very exciting thing going forward. Opening up that possibility of actually being able to talk directly to NPCs is going to change the gaming landscape very, very significantly and make it much more intuitive to explore new worlds, virtual worlds. So that is really high on my list of things that’re going to open this up to kind of the next billion people.

TP: Well, I mentioned Mike Booth earlier, and working with him, if I look back, that’s one of the things that I’ve definitely really, really enjoyed a lot. We designed a lot of great games together. We worked on Acron and Cook-Out and Demeo. As I said, even though he was in Southern California and we’re up in the northern part of Europe, here in Scandinavia, we did a lot of design of the games. Just meeting inside the game, playing it together, and deciding the next thing that we should tackle—it was a fantastic time, and I’m very happy we went through it. We miss it a lot. It’s not the same right now. He’s now working for another games company with flat screen games. So old school.

TP: Yes, yes, absolutely. Yeah, and Alicia Berry as well.

TP: I find it incredibly fun because I did something that I feel was a little bit similar when I joined. I started working with mobile games very, very early, when it was a very small and tightly knit community, and it’s grown and a lot of the same people stayed in the space. It’s just such a lovely community of people who share experiences. I think the game development community in general is very open, and we get to do some nice research where we can try new things. If things turn out well, the consumers are willing to pay for that kind of experimentation, and that’s really a fantastic community to have the privilege of working in. I have so many passionate colleagues that love to be in this very, very creative space and kind of at the forefront of technological advancement in many places.

TP: Well, I really look forward to just looking at a video of somebody playing a game like Racket Club in XR or in augmented reality, so you see that person and their natural movements, and everybody immediately understands what they’re doing. I very much look forward to having that a little bit more mass-market because I really think that everybody will enjoy that type of game.

We have also unearthed something very special with Spatial Ops, which just launched. FPS games are the most popular genre. However, they are notoriously sedentary and often isolating for hours of playtime. With Spatial Ops, we’re recreating this genre as we know it by getting people up out of their seats and moving around, turning their homes into a mixed reality, laser tag-like adventure while using their bodies as controllers, which makes gaming more intuitive, interactive, and fun than ever before.

I also think we’re going to come to a golden age in gaming as voice, AI, and hand tracking open up a very wide variety of different experiences that are much more natural to what most people find exciting. I think movies and books have done a much better job at reaching a more broad audience quicker, whereas with games, there is a great community of gamers willing to pay a lot of money for games, but it’s still very small in comparison to how broad some of these other mediums reach. I think that’s partially our fault as game developers—that we can still do a lot more to open things up.

TP: Thank you. I think it is very profitable with games, but we definitely still have a lot of work to do to make it more accessible.

TP: I would hope that they would be very excited by the space—either from a developer point of view where there’s so much to be discovered and explored, or from the consumer space that there’s so many cool things that’re going to happen. You can have this little mystery playing out in front of you, and you can try to figure out where the crime was. We’ve had great opportunities in books and other mediums, but here, you are more the main character, and that is very exciting for me.