Our Story

When the world closed its doors in 2020, my brother and I suddenly found ourselves on opposite sides of Canadatwo lifelong gamers and co-op addicts with no couch to share. Late-night voice chats kept the ritual alive, but every win felt muted through a headset mic. VR seemed like an obvious solution, so we each strapped on a headset andboomthere we were, standing shoulder to shoulder inside the same world, feeling that impossible sense of presence that flat screens just cant touch. It was magic for a while. Once the wow faded, we craved the same depth that used to keep us up all night the layered builds, the clutch saves and we soon discovered it just didnt exist yet.

We grew up on hand-me-down PCs balanced on shaky desks, losing entire weekends to the classicsRuneScape marathons, endless GTA: San Andreas mod nights, and epic length sessions of Risk of Rain 2 that ended only when sunrise leaked through the curtains. Those sessions taught us three things that never left:

• First, presence means nothing without purpose; the best worlds beg you to poke, prod, and remake them.

• Second, flow is fragile; the moment a HUD nags for attention, the magic snaps like a cheap cable.

• And third, chaos is the purest playground; the stories we still retell are the ones no designer could have scripted.

A decade in the industry only sharpened those ideals. So when the lockdown ended our couch-co-op routine, we dusted off the tools wed cut our teeth on and set out to build the VR game we'd been hunting for, but never quite found. One late-night prototype became two, then ten; each pass pulled us closer to a vision where momentum, gesture, and willful disorder could share the same space.

That vision crystallized into ZIX, a surreal VR roguelite where every run lets you nudge reality a little further off the rails

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Chasing Chaos

Those late-night prototypes snowballed fast. My brother and I poured weekends into Blender scenes, duct-taped Unity builds, and way too many half-finished mechanicshoping one would feel like the missing piece wed looked for in other VR games.

We kept circling the same ingredients:

• Replayability that never repeats: The rush of roguelikes where last-second combos flip defeat into highlight-reel victory.

• Physics you can feel: That first bowstring hum in VR or a mid-air dash that clicks and makes your stomach dropin the good way.

• Shared experimentation: The try thisokay, now try this moments where friends break a rule and accidentally write a new one.

• Surreal immersion: Worlds that feel like lucid dreamscolors bleeding, gravity misbehaving, architecture folding in on itselfamplified by the headset until you swear you can taste the atmosphere.

Every play-test reinforced a simple truth: depth doesnt have to slow you down; it can pull you deeper. So we quit our safe studio jobs, registered Hidden IO, and bet the house on building a universe around momentum, improvisation, and glorious mess-making.

ZIX is our attempt to bottle those midnight marathons and uncork them inside a headset. You slip on the hardware and instantly become an Acolyte, serving a cosmic entity that delights in broken rules. Every run is quick, lethal, and singular: gesture-driven movement lives in your wrists, while world-shifting modifiers let you tilt gravity, splice biomes, and swap enemies until the rules feel hand-writtennot by us, but by you (and whatever friends are sharing the chaos).

The point isnt mastery so much as discoveryhow strange can a universe get before it collapses, and can you ride that collapse long enough to claim victory?

What Comes Next

Over the coming months well peel back the layers:

• why our control scheme hides the HUD in your muscle memory

• how three distinct realms bleed together like wet ink

• how community feedback steers us as we sprint toward launch and beyond

Think of these posts as letters from behind the curtainequal parts progress log and campfire story. If a dreamlike playground of momentum and mayhem sounds like your jam, stay close. Were just getting started.

Hidden IO

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