Rec Room Died, Horizon Worlds Left VR, and Now Somebody Is Rebuilding Altspace

I went to a comedy show in Altspace in 2018. Actual standup, a guy on a little stage in a virtual club, maybe thirty of us sitting at tables made of polygons. He was not very good. I stayed for the whole set anyway, because what made it work had almost nothing to do with the jokes and everything to do with the fact that thirty strangers had independently decided to show up at the same time on a Tuesday to sit in a room together.

Microsoft turned that off on March 10, 2023.

SideQuest is turning it back on this fall.

Shane Harris, who founded SideQuest and still runs it, posted on Reddit this week that the company has acquired the rights to the Altspace name. He was careful about what that does and does not mean. This will be "a brand new Altspace" built for a modern audience, he wrote, and "a spiritual successor to the Altspace we know and love and capture what made it great." Not a restoration. Not Microsoft's code booted back up off a backup tape. A rebuild, aimed at fall 2026, with no firm date attached to it yet.

The year everything else died

The timing is the part I keep turning over.

Back in April I wrote that Rec Room shutting down meant social VR was in trouble, and I stand by every word of it, though the rest of 2026 has turned out to be considerably less kind than even that fairly gloomy piece was expecting. Rec Room actually went dark in June. Meta tried to pull Horizon Worlds out of VR in April, reversed course inside 48 hours when the backlash hit, and then did it anyway on June 15. The largest platform holder in consumer VR walked its own flagship social product off the headset it manufactures.

So the ledger for social VR this year reads: one outright shutdown, one platform exit by the company with the deepest pockets in the industry, and a widespread creeping sense that the entire category was a phase we all went through.

And into that, a company whose whole business is a sideloading storefront for Quest goes and buys a dead brand from 2023.

It sounds insane. I think it might be the smartest thing anybody in social VR has done in two years.

What SideQuest actually bought

Let me lead with the part that worries me. SideQuest bought a name.

Not the servers. Not the code, not the worlds people spent years building, not the event calendar, not the accounts, and above all not the people. Altspace was never really a piece of software in any way that mattered. It was a schedule. It was the improv troupe that met on Thursdays, the meditation group at seven in the morning, the church service, the recovery meeting, the guy who ran a weekly open mic for four years straight and knew every regular by their avatar. When Microsoft shut it down it did not delete a product. It scattered a few thousand small communities and told them to go find somewhere else to be.

Most of them never reassembled. That is what actually happens when one of these places closes, and it is why the "just move everyone to VRChat" advice has always been thinner than it sounds. VRChat is enormous and genuinely great and it is also a completely different social contract. VRChat is somewhere you go to be a character. Altspace was somewhere you went to be a person who happened to be somewhere else.

The robots

Here is the detail that convinced me somebody involved genuinely remembers.

SideQuest has rehired Christian Boe, the concept designer behind Altspace's original robot avatars. The new platform will have robots again, running alongside custom avatars.

If you were not there, that reads as nostalgia bait. It is not. Early Altspace put everybody in the same blocky robot bodies, and the effect that had on how people behaved was enormous and almost entirely unintentional. Nobody was hot. Nobody had commissioned a four-hundred-dollar model. There was no avatar economy, no status ladder, no way to read someone's investment in the platform off their appearance before they had said a single word to you. You got a robot. Everyone else got a robot. The only remaining variable was whether you were interesting to talk to.

Microsoft eventually replaced the robots with human avatars, which was a perfectly defensible decision on paper and delivered expressive faces, better presence, and something much closer to what the rest of the industry was shipping at the time. It also meant Altspace quietly began sorting people the way every other social platform sorts people.

Rehiring the guy who drew the robots is not a marketing move. Nobody outside of maybe fifteen thousand people has the faintest idea who Christian Boe is. It is a signal fired directly at the old community, and what it says is: we know which version of this we are rebuilding.

Why SideQuest, of all companies

SideQuest looks like an odd fit for about a minute.

The company has spent seven years being the place Quest owners go when the official store is not enough, which in practice has meant sideloaded builds, early access experiments, a considerable amount of jank, and the occasional thing Meta would not have approved in a hundred years. It is the closest thing consumer VR has to an independent scene, and it survived by being useful to a specific community rather than by chasing a metaverse valuation.

That is a considerably better foundation for this than anything Microsoft ever had. Microsoft owned Altspace for five and a half years and never once managed to articulate what it was for, filing it into the Mixed Reality division alongside HoloLens, treating it as a sort of enterprise collaboration prototype, and finally sacrificing it to clear room for Mesh. A social platform run by people who did not use it.

SideQuest's entire existence, by contrast, is a distribution channel bolted to an audience of people who actively enjoy weird VR software, and former Altspace staff and longtime community members are reportedly already on the team. The initial release is targeting 2016-era functionality: live events, meetups, user-created spaces. Events first. That is the correct order, and it is the opposite of how nearly everyone else has approached this problem.

What I actually expect

I want to be careful here, because I have been wrong about this category before and the failure mode is always identical. Everybody builds the room. Nobody schedules anything to happen inside it.

The hard part was never the rendering. Ten competent people can ship a solid social VR client in 2026, and Godot will hand them most of the engine for free. The hard part is the Tuesday night problem: getting enough people to independently decide that seven o'clock on Tuesday is when they go to the same place, week after week, long enough that it stops being an experiment and turns into a habit. Altspace solved that exactly once, over several years, with a small full-time events team and an enormous amount of unglamorous community management. Nobody has solved it since.

SideQuest is not a big company. Whether it can fund years of that deeply unglamorous work is the entire question hanging over this, and neither Harris nor anybody else can honestly answer it in a Reddit post announcing that they bought a trademark.

But somebody is trying. In the year Rec Room closed and Meta gave up on its own social platform inside its own headset, a company under no obligation to do any of this went and bought the name of the best one, then hired back the person who designed the robots.

I will be there on opening night. Probably at a mediocre comedy show.