Multiverse Engine – A retro game fan’s 3D engine, now in VR
July 31, 2026 at 09:58
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KORBEN ✨/3 MIN READ/Related categories
If you’re the type who gets motion sick in virtual reality headsets, then sorry, this one’s not for you. There’s a passionate developer out there who decided it would be cool to adapt retro video games into virtual reality.
He built a VR renderer based on the OpenXR standard for games like Super Mario 64 Co-op DX, Mario Kart 64, and Dr Robotnik Ring Racers. To do it, he used OpenXR, an open standard common to VR runtimes. To make the experience feel truly immersive inside the headset, the entire game is rendered once per eye. That way, instead of a flat screen floating in front of you, you get a fully immersive 3D universe.
All of this is available on his site and is openma mode that shrinks the entire track down to a miniature model you can race over
And his latest project is incredible – it’s Sonic Robo Blast 2, here’s the demo:
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I personally didn’t grow up as a Sega kid, but I know some of you are massive Sonic fans. And seeing this revisited game that takes the original and drops it into full 3D really makes me want to jump in – even if I know I don’t have the patience to sit with my face baking inside a VR headset that’s way too heavy for me for hours on end.
Alongside these ports, he’s also building his own 3D engine. It’s called Multiverse Engine, and it’s designed to run Multiverse, a dimensional exploration game planned for both standard screens and VR, where everything is seen through a
found footage
-style camera that breathes, sways, and picks up fragments of the next world like VHS static.
Nothing too complicated, but loaded with deliberate references to golden-age sci-fi, liminal spaces, the Backrooms, and pre-release No Man’s Sky. The game started out in Unreal Engine 5 before he decided the engine’s ceiling was too low – hence this homemade engine written from scratch in C++ and Direct3D 12, complete with its own renderer and its own editor.
And his personal obsession? Rifts in the game world (not security vulnerabilities – actual rifts, in the geological sense). So when a tear opens up in the scenery, the world behind it is rendered in real time, with its own lighting, fog, and sky, rather than being a flat texture slapped on.
Be careful not to confuse this with another project called Multiverse that exists – a No Man’s Sky project with no relation to the game above.
Anyway, this guy is seriously talented, and his next masterpiece will be Star Fox 64 in VR, which is already in development. I really encourage you to follow
his GitHub account
and keep an eye on
his website
.
This article was originally written in French and automatically translated. Read the original.
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