Oh the places you'll go in virtual reality. Using the recent video game South Park: The Stick of Truth from Obsidian Entertainment, a handful of programmers over at Tool have created a model of everyone's favorite snowy Colorado mountain town that is totally explorable with he aid of the Oculus Rift.
Thanks to virtual reality, Tool's build will allow you to take the viewpoint of a South Park citizen and walkaround, interacting with all of your favorite characters from the show. Mr. Garrison, Terrence & Phillip, Wizard Cartman, and cousin Kyle, everyone from the town is here. Even Chef!
"Taking inspiration from other renditions of the city of South Park, such as the most recent video game, Stick of Truth, and the season 17 show intro, we felt that a combination of flat cutout characters and more dimensional paper-textured buildings was the way to go," said the firm on its website.
"We began work modeling the buildings of the city in Cinema 4D and laying out a rough version with placeholders in Unity."
Despite taking inspiration from season 17, the trailer Tool has made is clearly modeled to look like the early days of South Park, back when it was just a few square blocks rather than the full blown city it has become today. Some locations like the City Wok and City Sushi are newer, but the trailer only uses older characters and even the classic South Park credits theme.
You can even find a way down into South Park's version of Hell and chat with Satan and Saddam Hussein, themes which have been absent from South Park for years. South Park was at its peak at Season 2 and Season 3, back when they made the masterpiece South Park: Bigger: Longer, & Uncut that summer, and unless they add more, Tool seems to agree.
"We loved this doodle of an experiment. Every aspect of the project gave us amusement: Recalling and reminiscing on favorite moments in the show's history, going through our long forgotten DVD sets (yes some of us still have optical drives) to research these moments, modeling the buildings, setting the environment, and creating our own avatars," the firm says on its website.
"Our hope is that you enjoy exploring and rediscovering your love for this amazing show as much as we did creating."
Now, we can only hope that Trey Parker and Matt Stone will give this the stamp of approval.
