While fans of the animated series Rick and Morty are anxiously awaiting the third season, co-creator Justin Roiland has been quietly building a virtual reality game studio with Tanya Watson, a former Epic Games Producer. It’s aptly named Squanchtendo, after an alien race in the Rick and Morty games that uses the word “squanch” as a replacement for many common words.
Roiland’s idea for a VR studio has actually been “squanching” around in his brain for a few years. “A gamer his whole life, he awoke to the idea of doing game design once he played with an Oculus DK2 headset,” according to Squanchtendo’s mission statement.
It was only recently, when Roiland began working with Watson, that Squanchtendo started to really take shape. In 10 years at Epic, Watson has put together an impressive profile, with work on games like Fortnite, Gears of War for PC, Bulletstorm, and Unreal Tournament 3.
Together, the pair are ready to dominate VR gaming, according to the mission statement: “We want to make stuff that people love. Games that we want to play ourselves. Experiences that we would like to be totally immersed in and enjoy for hours at a time, as well as shorter, crazier experiences that would be great to play with a group of friends or possibly with stray homeless people that you invited in so you could feed and bathe them.”
The previously announced Virtual Rickality title will still be produced by Owlchemy games, the same team behind the Vive launch title Job Simulator. Instead, Squanchtendo will focus on creating new IPs for virtual reality, likely starting with the HTC Vive, with Roiland’s unique, and often extreme, sense of humor guiding the duo’s creations.
The announcement’s timing is no coincidence, either. The annual Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle runs from September 2-6, and we would be surprised if we didn’t squanch something from Roiland and Watson then.
After five years with Apple silicon, from the original M1 MacBook Air to the M5 MacBook Air released earlier this year, I've watched these chips mature not just on the spec sheet, but in real-world workflows and overall efficiency.
The new M6 chip might sound like a routine generational upgrade, but it's the company's first chip built on a 2nm manufacturing process, which brings meaningful improvements over previous Apple chips.
Gemini Notebook’s mobile app now has a built-in recorder for capturing lectures and meetings as sources. You can record directly where you’ll use the material, skipping the separate recording app and the file upload afterward.
Google announced the feature on X, highlighting classroom lectures and team meetings as potential uses. It also works for capturing your own thoughts, so you can talk through an idea and bring that explanation into your notebook while it’s still fresh.
In 1950, Alan Turing asked whether machines can think. Rather than argue over definitions, he turned the question into a party game, where an interrogator trades typed messages with hidden players and tries to work out who is who. Since then, chatbots have gotten so good that they have already fooled humans in modern versions of the test.
So, four researchers from Paris Cité University asked the obvious follow-up question in a new study published in Computers in Human Behavior Reports: can AI at least catch its own kind?