More than three years in the making, Quentin Lengelé’s Blade Runner 9732 VR fan project is finally set to hit Steam on January 7th. The experience, which lets you stroll a screen-accurate replica of Blade Runner (1982) neo-noir protagonist Rick Deckard’s entire apartment, is coming to HTC Vive for free.
Over the course of three years, we’ve seen plenty of tantalizing screenshots and devlog videos, but soon both VR and non-VR users will be able to peruse Deckard’s apartment as it was featured in the sci-fi classic Blade Runner.
As a freelance creative software engineer, Lengelé started the project as an exercise in 3DS Max height mapping, but it quickly grew into a personal challenge to bring himself closer to Blade Runner by creating the most accurate 3D replica of the film’s iconic apartment.
“After the [creating the] walls, I started to reproduce most of the furniture to get closer to the movie,” Lengelé writes on his Patreon. “I watched Blade Runner so many times, almost frame by frame, and I found a lot of items on propsummit.com and other furniture fan websites. It’s a job of patience with a lot of research to spot every single object but it was a real opportunity for me to explore new software, improve my modeling skills and be able to create a mythic virtual place in the meantime.”
Atop the Deckard’s 97th floor apartment, you’ll be able to explore his the entire apartment including picking up the film’s iconic objects, playing the piano, taking a shower, starting the Esper machine and simply enjoying the rain falling on the balcony with a scotch in hand.
“The interactions are quite simple for now because I focused on exact replica modeling of the whole place to get the best immersion,” says Lengelé. “I really wanted to push attention to details and reproduce the lighting and sound atmosphere of this movie.”
Lengelé says in a blogpost that the game in currently under approval on Steam, but that if it doesn’t somehow launch before Christmas, he’ll “surely propose a way to download it before 7th January.”
While the Steam listing only denotes Vive support, Lengelé maintains his experience is built using OpenVR, meaning any supported headset (including Oculus Rift) shouldn’t have a problem popping into the experience.
