“There was a lot of stuff we had to work around,” Carlin told me. He’s always trying to recreate the extremes of human experience, to teleport people to different places and times with his work.
How much of it is real versus how much of it is suggestive of what it was like? How do we put Dan’s voice at the center of this without it being distracting or compared against what you’re seeing visually?”įor Carlin, VR aligns nicely with his goals as a podcaster. “And I also think there was a lot of work that we did with Dan, specifically, on how we wanted to present this. “It was always a balancing act,” Stearns said. It originally premiered as an installation piece at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2019. Even recalling that final scene now, as I write this, makes my flesh crawl.Įthan Stearns, executive vice president of content at MWM Interactive, told Polygon that the challenge for his team was to temper the experience for a general audience. That’s when the light shifted, revealing the horrors that had previously been hidden in the darkness all around me. The conclusion found me rising bodily from the muddy pits of Passchendaele as a cloud of green gas poured over the ground. That’s where the sound design - handled by the legendary team at Skywalker Sound - came to the fore. The action then dove deep below the trench line, where I was able to experience the pounding of an endless artillery barrage directly overhead. War Remains opened by putting me inside the copula of a French Caquot-type observation balloon as a fur ball of period fighter planes swirled around each other in a densely clouded sky. Compared to Carlin’s Blueprint for Armageddon series, which spans six episodes and has a run time of around 24 hours, the vast majority of the veteran podcaster’s work on WWI was left behind for this VR experience. My only complaint is that War Remains, at around 10 minutes, is entirely too short.
But the presentation of that material, which draws from classic cinema, Broadway-style set design, and Carlin’s own unique vocal delivery creates something truly magical. Developed by Flight School Studio, War Remains is - like its source material - a passive experience. Journalist Dan Carlin, best known for his popular long-form podcast Hardcore History, has teamed up with MWM Interactive to create a new World War I-themed virtual reality experience.