April/May 2017
“I DON’T WANT TO BE ANOTHER EDUARDO,” LUCKEY TOLD CHEN, REFERRING TO the famously ousted—and, in Silicon Valley, largely considered “forgotten”—Facebook cofounder Eduardo Saverin.
For a second—sitting in Luckey’s home as they discussed the future of Anduril—Chen was slightly taken aback. This was such an uncharacteristically vulnerable thing for Luckey to say, but it kind of made sense that Luckey would bring this up now as the two of them were up late at night reviewing a pitch deck for their new company. When they went in to meet with these VCs, Luckey didn’t want to be perceived as “another Eduardo.”
“Dude,” Chen said, shaking his head. “Never gonna happen. For one thing, Eduardo was just a money guy and you’re, well, you’re you; and two, just seeing how quickly things have come together over the last month . . . I mean, I didn’t exactly know what I was getting in to, but it didn’t take me long to realize: holy shit, it’s happening . . . again!”
Luckey nodded. To prevent the conversation from getting too cozy, too vulnerable, he sped into talking about some new drone technology he’d heard about, the pros and cons of LIDAR technology, and “totally unrelated, but pretty awesome,” Luckey told Chen about a trip that he and Nicole were going to take in May. An actual vacation, finally. To go attend an anime celebration in Tokushima, Japan, called “Machi Asobi.”
“SO FACEBOOK FIRED YOU BECAUSE OF YOUR POLITICAL VIEWS?”
“I can’t comment on that,” Luckey replied to a twentysomething Japanese VR enthusiast. He was one of several—most in colorful cosplay—who had gathered around Luckey to ask him questions (or for his autograph) as they all waited for a panel at Machi Asobi to begin.
“Because NDA?” another one of the enthusiasts asked.
“I’m sorry,” Luckey replied. “I can’t say.”
“That is bullshit!” a girl in the huddle said. Luckey, stiffly, did not react in any revealing manner—no sigh, no smile, no shrug—as those around him all vigorously nodded in agreement with the girl who had seemingly concluded that what had gone down at Facebook was bullshit. “They are bullshit.”
Shortly after this, Yui Araki—a budding VR developer who helped manage the business of Japan’s most well-known virtual reality evangelist, GOROman—came over to take Luckey and Edelmann to their seats for the panel they were attending. Araki, who had been friends with Luckey for a few years by this point, had spent the past few days serving as a sort of translator/chaperone for him and Edelmann while they were visiting for Machi Asobi, basically just making sure that Luckey and Edelmann caught all the nerdiest shit (and had the means to translate their geeking out if need be). As Araki pulled Luckey away from the huddle, she overheard several fans say to Luckey a few phrases that required no translation.
“You a great man!”
“You are the reason VR happened!”
“You will be very successful again!”
Hearing these comments, Araki was pleased. It reminded her of how “wrong” it had felt when Palmer was not at the previous year’s Oculus Connect; and about how, at that event, she had felt exploited for her race and gender in a weird sort of American way that she noticed happening more and more. “I attended Women of VR,” she wrote to the event-planners, “and was asked ‘Can I take a photo?’ by a man who is in black T shirt with no logo nor badge. He said nothing about what he was going to use my photo [for] or what organization he belong to . . . the next day, my photo was on the stage [at the Keynote]. I was very surprised. ‘Using the photo of who you think is minority on the Keynote without your explanation and their permission’ is the diversity you have? I don’t think so . . . I think true diversity is to think every developer and consumer all over the world equally important and to respect every VR creator from indie, student to AAA title developer in any countries equally. I know you have the true diversity. Just show your diversity in Oculus Connect.”
She ended her note by sharing displeasure about Luckey’s absence. “I wanted to see Palmer in the Keynote. I wanted to see his vision about the VR in the future . . . When I met him for the first time, he was so happy to play my first VR game and gave me feedback honestly and said thanks so much to me for developing VR content because hardware is just a paperweight without content. He played my VR game so seriously, actually he is the best score holder! I was just a nonprogrammer-beginner-Asian-woman who started learning Unity three months ago. I think that’s true diversity.”
The panel that Araki, Luckey and Edelmann were attending that evening was a roundtable of content creators, featuring their mutual friend GOROman. Taking their seats in the audience, they were eager to see GOROman talk about his journey from creating Mikulus for DK1 to his current work, to the future of virtual reality. Seated beside GOROman—an unexpected panelist—was Seiji Mizushima, who had directed an anime film about virtual reality that Luckey had loved called Expelled from Paradise. What a nice surprise, seeing Mizushima up there, but then again everything over the past few days had been.
Flying out, Luckey hadn’t really known what to expect. It had been almost nine months since he last attended any kind of expo, convention, or trade show. If you took away the ZeniMax trial, it had basically been nine months since he was in any sort of situation where he was likely to be recognized. And so, coming to Japan, Luckey wasn’t sure what type of reception would await him.
Fortunately, Machi Asobi turned out to be everything he had hoped for. It was almost like he’d gone back in time to right before the Daily Beast started spreading lies. The people here, his fellow anime lovers, they couldn’t have been nicer. They didn’t care about his political opinions; nor did they look down on him like his exit from Oculus was an embarrassing fall from grace. All anyone who recognized him wanted to talk about was anime, virtual reality, or his “bold” choice of attire.
That bold choice—to cosplay as Quiet from Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain—had Luckey dressed in thick boots, torn nylon stockings and a skimpy black bikini top. And he was not alone, joined by Edelmann in matching attire.
“I am willing to admit,” Luckey had told her, “that you look slightly better than I do.”
Edelmann smiled and as fans snapped photos of her and Luckey—both then, and throughout the trip—she was reminded of something she had said to a friend six months prior: “I think I would have done just fine with an ordinary life: the kids, the mortgage, the white picket fence—I would have been fine with that. But because I’m able to do cool shit, I feel like I have to. For all the people who can’t.”
Luckey and Edelmann’s matching outfits were apparently such a hit that it was covered by tech journalists back in the US. Though Luckey appreciated that these reporters found his love of cosplay to be newsworthy, he didn’t much appreciate that just about everyone had still-uncorrected stories about him and Nimble America; and that, of course, those inaccurate stories got linked back to in these new ones. Fucking journalists.
Actually, that wasn’t fair. There were still a handful of good journalists out there, Luckey believed, one of whom was a reporter for MoguraVR—a niche Japanese outlet—and with whom Luckey decided to do his first interview since leaving Oculus.
When speaking with MoguraVR, it was quickly apparent that Luckey could not discuss his exit from Facebook or go into much detail about the projects he had worked on while he was still there. But it was also clear—to the reporter, to his readers, and even to Edelmann—that Luckey truly loved taking a step back to talk about technology:
Palmer, you were influenced from the sci-fi novel Snow Crash if I recall right. Many people are thinking that as technology progresses we are getting closer to a sci-fi world. If you had to create an anime right now what would it be about? What kind of future do you imagine?
The truth is I actually have several ideas for a sci-fi anime. It’s something I think about in my spare time but I don’t know if I ever will realize them. One of them is about a future in which automation is commonplace. All cars are self-driving and all the work is done by computers. Humans no longer know how to drive a car and have become unable to think with their own heads . . . The only exception is a group that is rebelling against this society. They can assemble, repair, and drive their own cars. They do not use any handy technology like computers and are thinking with their own heads, they are living freely without being swallowed up by the system.
Is this a dystopian future like the ones you see in The Matrix and The Terminator?
What I want to depict is a good future. It is not a dystopia where the machines are controlling everything. But you could say that it is a bit like a dystopia. I want to show how technology that is good for society can at the same time make society lose its greatest strength: individuality.
During that interview, Edelmann had seen a spark on Luckey’s face that she hadn’t seen for a long time. And she missed that; because she knew that he missed that. The good news was that every day, Luckey seemed to be feeling more and more like himself. Getting back to work was a big part of it; the long days spent building something out of nothing; the late nights spent plotting with old friends like Chen and Dycus. It was kind of like the early days of Oculus, again.
From where does your passion for VR come nowadays?
On an almost weekly basis I find content that makes me want to say: “VR is the future, I have to make the future of VR happen sooner.” What I fear the most at the moment is that the speed at which VR is spreading at is not fast enough, and that people are going to lose their excitement for VR at this rate. [So] what motivates me right now is “How can we make VR more attractive for everyone,” “How can we speed up the popularization of VR?” and “How can we help VR developers to succeed as a business?” At the moment it is difficult for VR developers to support themselves just with developing VR content.
Getting back to work helped. Creating, modding, scrapping; those was all key to growing back what had been lost. Coming out to Machi Asobi was also key. The people were incredible, the costumes were insane, and it also didn’t hurt that Luckey would be flying home with an extra suitcase to bring back all the trinkets and memorabilia he had acquired, an overindulgence that Luckey jokingly explained to Edelmann was just what happens when you carry around thousands of dollars in cash (which was something he did when traveling abroad). In addition to work and taking this trip, there was one other big thing, too: the internet. For as long as he could remember, the internet had been his home away from home. And after a long hiatus, Luckey had returned to the good, bad, and ugly of the internet one month earlier with a short, simple, six-letter message posted on Reddit: im back.
“Come up here, Palmer!” GOROman said, waving for his friend to join the panel.
For a moment, Luckey wasn’t sure if he should go. Would that intrude on the panel? Will I mess up their flow since I don’t speak Japanese? But GOROman continued to wave him forward, and soon the audience began cheering for Palmer Luckey to join them onstage.
Okay. Here we go. As Luckey began moving toward the stage he decided that he wasn’t going to let the crowd down. So he started running—sprinting!—right on down the aisle. And then instead of taking the stairs and walking onstage—you know, like a normal person—he catapulted himself, belly flopping onto the stage and sliding underneath the panel table . . .
It has now been five years since I founded Oculus. It went by really fast . . .
Luckey then popped up on the other side—to a round of applause, of course—then he took a seat beside the other panelists and weaved himself into the conversation.
Eventually, they started talking about the potential of using VR to create anime. In fact, this idea had been so appealing to Seiji Mizushima, the director Luckey admired, that Mizushima wanted to actually build a suite of animation tools.
“Palmer, can you use your superpowers to help make that happen?” a translator asked, relaying this question on behalf of the moderator.
“Well,” Luckey replied. “I only have one superpower . . .”
He dramatically paused, so the translator knew not to wait. Then, as soon as the translator finished, fully delivering the setup to his punch line, he reached into his pocket. And with a defiant grin that told the world that he was really back, would always be back, could never be defeated, Palmer Luckey—the showman, the tinkerer, the kid who had founded Oculus—pulled out a fistful of cash from his pocket, somewhere in the neighborhood of a few thousand dollars, and then showered the Expelled from Paradise director with some of the money that he had made in paradise.
. . . I can’t even believe that it really has been five years. Every day of my life was fulfilled. Looking back at it—at all that time—it really went by in a flash.