Schell Games, a Pittsburgh-based gaming studio based out of Station Square, announced the planned release of its newest title, Lost Recipes, which aims to combine the educational history of food dishes from ancient civilizations with a virtual reality cooking experience.
The game will retail for $14.99 on Jan. 27 when it launches exclusively on the Meta Quest platform from Meta Platforms Inc. (NASDAQ: FB). It's the first game from the Pittsburgh gaming studio to launch exclusively for Meta's VR ecosystem.
According to Melanie Harke, the game's project director, the idea behind the game came from a desire to showcase an experience that can be educational in content but also fun in a VR gaming environment. She said the company met with academics and other subject matter experts to research and provide information for the game, which includes recipes from ancient Chinese, Greek and Mayan civilizations. It also includes voiceovers from native speakers of these languages.
"We were looking to do an educational VR experience with (Quest), and we were thinking about what is really good to do with your hands in a location, and that's really where cooking came from," Harke said. "We wanted to have something that really embraced VR and something that people could do at home and maybe nongamers would be interested in doing as well. That was very important for us, to sort of reach out to new demographics."
It's far from the first title for the company, founded in 2002 by Jesse Schell. The company, which employs around 135 workers, has launched between 20 and 30 titles since its founding when including work it has completed for customers individually.
"This is the latest game in the long history of developing VR experiences, including original games and also client work that we've done," Kat De Shields-Moon, the company's public relations manager, said. "We have a legacy of creating dynamic and engaging virtual reality experiences for entertainment's sake. But we also are very heavily invested in using VR and different media for educational purposes. Our title like History Maker VR is an example, or HoloLAB Champions, which is VR chemistry. Lost Recipes kind of blends those two worlds and creates this magical experience that isn't too gamer-heavy, it isn't too education-heavy."
The company declined to disclose revenue figures.
