Following their USC days, Burba, Iliff, and Silkin moved out to San Francisco and used a prototype of their college VR game Zombies in the Holodeck to introduce investors to VR and raise funds for Survios and development of Raw Data.
For James Iliff, that meant jumping from school to school and major to major to find an educational avenue for VR development.
Stories from that chapter of Survios’ oral history can be found in the full Glixel interview, along with looks at how the VR shooter Raw Data evolved from that early Zombies in the Holodeck demo.
Survios’ first game Raw Data became the first VR title to rake in $1 million in sales in only a month’s time, but the game and the studio both had their own humble beginnings.