WORCESTER—Imagine a dragon climbing your living room wall or battling a skeleton in your kitchen. That’s now possible thanks to Mythic Realms, the latest release from Worcester-based gaming studio Petricore. The mixed-reality role-playing game, launched March 13 on Meta Quest devices, blends real-world surroundings with fantasy adventure.
“We wanted to create a role-playing game where you can become a hero and go on adventures in the real world, and of course, we also put a dragon in your room,” Petricore CEO Ryan Canuel explained to the Worcester Guardian.
The game, developed in partnership with Meta and soon available on Meta Quest devices, transforms players’ spaces into dungeons, forests, and caves teeming with creatures that scale furniture and emerge from walls. The experience alternates between mixed reality, where players battle and gather resources, and full virtual reality, during which they use those materials to expand a kingdom.
Petricore, marking its 10th anniversary this spring, was founded by a team of local graduates from Clark University, WPI and Becker College (which closed at the end of the 2021 school year). The company has built a reputation for innovative game development, creating both original titles and collaborations with major brands such as Burger King, Mitsubishi, and Bose.
According to Canuel, getting Mythic Realms off the ground required years of networking and pitching to partners such as Meta. “We came out to California on multiple occasions and also to Gamescom in Germany to pitch Mythic Realms to a variety of partners before we ended up working with Meta,” he said.
Developing a game that blends real and virtual worlds bumped against some unique challenges. “It’s like building the airplane while also trying to fly it,” Canuel said. Some of the necessary technology didn’t even exist when they first pitched the game, requiring patience and close collaboration with Meta as the tools evolved.
“We’ve really honed our focus over the last 10 years to be focused on games for emerging platforms like Mixed and Augmented Reality,” Canuel continued. “When we first started, we worked on a wide variety of projects and platforms. Over the years we’ve focused in on opportunities that we found exciting, but also were more ‘blue ocean’ in terms of places we believed we had a better chance to stand out and be successful in.”
Beyond its technical achievements, Mythic Realms is a testament to the strength of Worcester’s game development scene. Petricore also benefited from local support, including office space from Becker and Clark in its early days, as well as programs such as Startup Worcester and Leadership Worcester.
“I’m honestly most proud of our team for this milestone,” added Canuel. “I wouldn’t be celebrating this without them. Most of the founding team is still at Petricore 10 years later, and we’ve had employees working here for years now. Most companies don’t make it this far, and many that do tend to look a lot different from when they first started. We’ve managed to keep an incredibly talented team together for 10 years, in a really difficult industry to work in. I also just love living here.”
Mythic Realms is available now on the Meta Store for $19.99.
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