It has been over four years since screaming fighter jets, roaring turboprops and booming behemoths have taken to the skies of VRChat. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, people across the planet took the plunge into virtual reality experiences to offset the restrictive lockdown procedures put in place for safety.
VRChat, a community driven social virtual reality platform, saw an explosion of activity during those years. Some of the staff members of Skyward Flight Media also purchased hardware and made VRChat accounts to find connection while the world was in isolation. Instead of hanging out in pubs and castles, we were lucky enough to be involved with the beginning of SaccFlight - the next generation of VRChat aviation experiences on the platform.
Between the testing, battles, airshows and original aircraft development, Santiago “Cubeboy” Cuberos found a shared interest in aviation with Tupper; the head of community for VRChat.
Hello! Thanks so much for agreeing to an interview. After seeing each other off and on for so long during the virtual airshows, it is great to have a formal interview together.
Hi Cube! Thanks for having me on.
What is your background with aviation in general? Was it a childhood passion, or was it something else?
It was indeed partially a childhood passion, but that passion was fueled by a few things. My dad is a retired United States Air Force Colonel. He has always followed aviation in a lot of ways. He’s told me about watching Apollo 11 land on the moon in 1969. Through him, I learned about his time in the Air Force in Vietnam on tankers, and his journey into medivac (medical evacuation) and logistics.
His drive and passion isn’t just for the amazing machines that we create and what they do, but what we use them for. Both of my parents were in the medical field, and they taught me critical and subtle lessons in how important it is to help others, to support others, no matter what you’re doing. That’s had lasting effects on me in a lot of different ways. I am beyond lucky and fortunate to have my folks be people like that, and support me no matter what I wanted to do. I don’t think I tell them that enough.
That being said, that meant my childhood libraries were full of books about aviation. I read non-fiction series like the Time-Life series The Epic of Flight. All 23 books, cover to cover, over and over. Fictional books like Dale Brown’s Flight of the Old Dog. I went to airshows regularly, watched space launches whenever we could.
In the early 90s, we picked up flight simulators pretty quickly. Both dad and I burned hours in Microsoft Flight Simulator, Space Simulator, Aces Over Europe, Aces of the Pacific, all those early Dynamix games. Falcon 3.0 and Jane’s Fighter Anthology came later.
Later in life, after I got my degree in Physics, I ended up working as a US Navy subcontractor, where I contributed to the F/A-18 and F-35 programs. Although my work was, practically, a ton of Excel spreadsheets, I still got to spend a ton of time with aviators. I worked alongside aviators that flew the F-14, F/A-18, the EA-6B, and tons of other aircraft.
Of course, that job came with occasional fun perks like going to Norfolk and Virginia Beach to hang out on carriers, walk the flightline at Oceana, that kind of stuff.
Have you played any flight games or simulators? Do you still play any today?
Tons! Aside from the ones I mentioned above, I’ve played DCS, War Thunder, the Ace Combat series, Project Wingman, as many as I can get my hands on. I’m not very good at DCS, though. I don’t have enough spare neurons left to memorize the startup sequence for a Hornet.
I’ve spent the most time recently playing Nuclear Option, which is a wonderful fictional “soft” flight simulator. It’s somewhere between Ace Combat and War Thunder’s realism mode, with a focus on near-future aircraft.
I play a lot of “Escalation” style multiplayer modes, where the idea is that you start out in little prop-driven CAS aircraft, gaining points and “escalating” the conflict. Eventually, you fly jets, interceptors, even heavy bombers as you unlock weapons. First you get access to small, 5kt nuclear weapons, then eventually 250kt monsters. It’s a lot of fun and gets regular updates. I enjoy the small community it has.
Oh, and of course, I fly a lot in VRChat.
How did you first become involved with VRChat?
I found VRChat in July 2017 when I was scrolling through Steam. I had a Vive CV1 that was sitting, collecting dust, and I wanted to find something to do with it.
I filtered by VR, then filtered by Free to Play. I found VRChat pretty quickly. A short download later, I hopped into VR, and joined a Presentation Room with a few folks in it.
There was a green-haired anime girl, a game rip of a Neptunia model recolored for someone. She started berating me for no reason -- but without speaking! She used the pens, writing words and waving her arms at me frantically telling me… something. I never figured it out.
Anyhow, that interaction was just the start. Eventually, someone mentioned that you could upload custom avatars to VRChat, and I started learning how to make them every day for hours after I’d come home from work, then log in and show off my work.
What lead to you becoming the Head of Community for the entire platform?
I applied to VRChat on a whim in October or November of 2017. It was a general application. My data science skills weren’t quite in line with what VRChat needed then, so I focused more on “hey, I can do support for you, answer emails, etc” with my ~15 years of IT experience.
Also, in the meantime, I’d been publishing video tutorials on how to work on avatars for VRChat. I’d figured out a process to turn MMD avatars into VRChat avatars, and published a long video showing the process. That got pretty popular with a few hundred thousand views, and even today still gets more.
In November 2017, VRChat was growing pretty quick. November 1st had a max user count of maybe 100 to 150 on a busy night. End of November, it’d doubled to 200 to 300.
By the middle of the December? Thousands. January, that number started climbing into the TENS of thousands.
I’d met quite a few members of the VRChat team by this time, including several members of leadership and both of the founders. They reached out during the holidays, looking for someone to handle the deluge of support emails they’d been getting.
In January I signed a contract to work for VRChat, and for a time, worked two jobs -- my normal 9-5 at my Navy contractor job, then I’d come home and work another 8 hours.
After two weeks, I decided that VRChat was the way to go, and handed in my two weeks at my previous job. While it was interesting, VRChat was far more interesting to me. I still miss it (and the people) sometimes.
Later, I got hired as a full-time employee, as the sole Community Manager at VRChat. I handled all kinds of stuff, handed off support tasks to other folks, and instead took up the reins of managing communication, interactions with the community, feedback, and helping the team understand the wide and broad community of VRChat.
A few years later, as we started to organize into a sane shape, I was promoted to Head of Community. Now, I lead the Community team and provide input and feedback to basically all of the VRChat team, helping them connect with our community to get a better understanding of the desires, needs, wants, and thoughts of our community at large.
Head of Community for a platform of tens of thousands of people seems like it would be a rather complicated job. Can you describe what your official duties like?
I mean, depending on how you count it, it’s millions of people! But yes, it is complicated, to put it lightly.
I spend a ton of my time in meetings and calls, consulting with the product teams at VRChat that actually build the application. A lot of this time is spent providing context and receiving understanding about what we’re making so I can tell all of you what’s going on.
While we have a lot of user research going on for both qualitative and quantitative inputs, I also act as a “signal attenuator”, where I can provide translations of what the “community zeitgeist” currently is about. This means a LOT of reading social feeds, Twitter, our subreddit, Discord, and tons of listening to folks in VRChat. This isn’t exactly “part of the job” but I feel it’s vital at our scale. I’ve picked up a ton of active listening skills, as well as being able to listen to multiple conversations at once just within earshot, lol.
I also do a lot of writing. A lot. Most of our external communications are handled by Strasz, FlareRune, and Fax, our Community Managers at VRChat. However, I still provide input, direction, and review for all three of them (although honestly all three are amazing writers and rarely need correction or help).
Most of my writing nowadays is on internal product docs, proposals, reviews, reports, and the like.
What was your first exposure with aircraft in VRChat, and what was your initial impression of these flyable aircraft?
My first exposure? Huh.. probably the jetpacks in Treehouse in the Shade. They’re TERRIBLE! I mean, they were great for the time in SDK2, but they immediately make me sick every time I use them, even today.
However, when I saw Udon release and people started to play with it, there were a few standouts that were really interesting. There was one world where you stood on the back of an airplane and flew it, and everyone around would stand on the top of the aircraft. The gimmick was that the world moved, rather than the aircraft -- a clever way of dealing with floating point issues and putting people on moving platforms.
Those were fun, but I never would’ve imagined what we have today.
Did you ever try some of the pre-SaccFlight aviation worlds that were developed before April 2020?
Not really! I had a few run-ins with them but none were really memorable until I ran into Saccchan’s systems.
After four years of VRChat Aviation (VRCA), now there are flight worlds across every type of real and sci-fi flight experiences. From Gliders to modern 4th generation fighters, from strategic bombers to space fighters. What type of flying do you enjoy in VRChat?
There’s four worlds I really love for flying:
First, there’s Zweikaku and 7-Eleven’s world Carrier Flight: F-14. I have this habit formed where I load into the world, put on the Fairy Air Force soundtrack, hop in a Harrier, and fly around until someone shoots at me. Then I defend, pop them with a missile, and resume flying in orbits.
Of course, if there’s no Harrier available, I get into whatever plane I see first, find the first Harrier I see, shoot it down, immediately respawn, and try to get into the Harrier. Like clockwork. lol
Second is Uni Power’s Yalu Conflict. I love the aircraft available -- there’s a ton of choices. Initially I favored the La-9, but quickly moved over to the F8F Bearcat -- almost entirely because of the ridiculous R-2800 engine. Turns out that I’ve got good taste, because my favorite WWII aircraft, the P-47 Thunderbolt, shares that engine with the Bearcat.
Third is another Uni Power world: Mid Palau. I pretty much exclusively use the P-47 here, occasionally hopping in the Enola Gay to jumpscare folks with the nuke. It’s really nice to fly around just above the water, chilling out. I really like the sound design Uni’s done in the world. Even while typing this out, I can hear the engine sound in my mind.
Finally, I really enjoy Project Helo by CodyHayzett. There’s no combat here, the weapons deal no damage. It’s all helicopters and weird structures to fly through. I love the little community I run into when I join this world -- they’re all amazing pilots, flying helicopters through ridiculous stunt routines. It reminds me of old Battlefield 1942 stunt maps -- maps where the focus wasn’t on combat, but instead doing weird stunts with the physics engine and flight system.
VRChat, being a community-based and community-built platform, relies on users to create new and better experiences. Do you have any particular flight world creators that you personally like? If so, which ones and which worlds of theirs do you enjoy?
I kinda jumped the gun on this question! I really enjoy Zweikaku and 7-Eleven’s work, as well as Uni Power’s work. We’ve got similar taste in favorite aircraft. VTail’s work on pushing the realism barrier to “acceptably arcadey” is really cool, although I still can’t stop ripping my wings off.
What are your thoughts on the competitive side of VRCA, with one example being the dogfighting tournaments ran by the VRC Black Aces?
Honestly, I’ve never been a competitive person. I prefer to observe! My ROE when flying is “I don’t shoot first, but I do shoot last.”
There’s a few exceptions to that rule, though… if I randomly shoot you down, it’s probably because you were micspamming music, said something dumb and edgy in an attempt to get attention, or asked “how do I do a cobra?” in the F-14 world.
I do really like watching tournaments, though. I can pick up on the technicalities of BFM, although I think I prefer the strategy and technology behind BVR insofar as “entertainment value” if I were playing a game. Speaking of which, when’s Sea Power in the Missile Age coming out?
I haven’t gone to many tournaments but I want to go to more. There’s a few members of the VRChat team interested too, so uh, DM me?
Also, no, I won’t dogfight you. I’ll probably lose.
Did you ever expect to see a competitive PvP flight community to arise in VRChat? These pilots sometimes train daily to be on top of their game
I did not. Absolutely did not. I had expectations when Udon released, but they were things like “someone’s gonna make Trouble in Terrorist Town” and other GMod-style game modes like that.
I think “pretty damn good flight simulator with good enough networking to hold tournaments” was not on my top 100 guess list, at all.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, you have airshows and showcases. The most popular ones, usually hosted by the VRC Black Aces or several of the Japanese communities, can fill an entire instance in mere minutes. How many airshows or ‘showcases’ have you attended so far? Have any of these left a mark on you?
Not only have I gone to a few, but I’ve commentated on two of them alongside Andy!
I love airshows and air displays so being able to see them in VR is incredible. You get to see aircraft that don’t exist anymore, or even NEVER existed.
I think the most striking show so far was the one that featured ridiculously huge aircraft. I forget the name of it, but there was that huge one that was a concept, some kind of nuclear-powered giga-aircraft designed to carry other aircraft. That one was a good one.
If you could summarize it, what has been your experience been with VRCA so far? Do you have any fond memories with the community or any special moments that have stuck with you?
It’s been wonderful. The VRChat aviation community is incredibly kind, welcoming, and open. Not only that, but they’re INCREDIBLY creative and collaborative. Every project takes the work of multiple people to produce a really cool output.
The few times that people have popped up that don’t represent those kinds of values, I’ve seen the community knock them down, because the last thing they want to do is make someone feel unwelcome. That’s a good sign -- never tolerate intolerance.
I’ve got a lot of great memories, but honestly the ones I remember best are simply joining friends in the community while they’re working on a new project. There’s always some funny bug or weirdness that they didn’t intend that everyone’s goofing around with.
I recently joined on Zweikaku and 7-Eleven to find them testing out a rather overpowered AI CIWS system, and everyone in the instance was trying their hardest to blow them up. The only way someone managed it was by landing an aircraft out of the range of fire and “driving” it up next to the emplacement, and blasting it point-blank with the cannon. That was hilarious. I love emergent, weird, funny stuff like that.
If you were to ever make a flight world for VRC, what would it look like? Are there any aircraft that or mechanics you would put on it?
It’d be REALLY HARD, but I’d love a proper BVR experience. A few people have tried, like the F-15 world from a year or two back. I forget who made it. It was OK, and they did they absolute best they could, but there were foundational issues with it.
The problem they struggled with is the same issue everyone does out at ranges past 10km -- floating point error makes it impossible to use! You get those crazy “wiggles” where polygons start flying off your HUD. 10km is well within the traditional definition of BVR (~37km), so you’ve got to solve that first.
If I could do anything, I’d find a way to implement a networkable floating origin system into VRChat natively, then use that to make a BVR world. I’d make it so you could flip a switch to either spawn 4th or 5th gen aircraft. I’d also want to have AEW&C aircraft that you could fly (or assign an AI to) that you could data link to.
Then, I’d make the terrain a bunch of mountains, valleys, and some open ocean, and have fun with that. Put in some game modes -- Protect the President, CAS, CAP, Intercept, that kind of thing. That’d be so fun!
Thanks a lot for this opportunity, Tupper. It was a privilege to be able to host this interview with you. Do you have any closing comments or anything you would like to tell our audience?
Thanks for having me!
VRChat has been and always will be about you. In any other game, you have objectives, win conditions, and goals. Here? There’s one goal: work together to make each other better. Whether you do that by being creative, making friends, or by running and participating in communities like the ones in VRCA, you’re helping.
VRChat’s a wildly important space for me personally, and for many others. I hope people understand that, for me and many others on the team, VRChat isn’t just a job. It isn’t just a product or a game or an app. It’s an incredibly important place, unlike anywhere else on the internet. Nobody else has what we have.
Our team is talented. We could work anywhere else, but we work here because we love seeing what it’s done for you, your friends, and our friends. We want it to be here forever so it can help as many people as possible, and we’ll fight hell or high water to see it go otherwise.
About the writer
Longtime aviation fanatic with particular preference towards military aviation and its history. Said interests date back to the early 2000s, leading into his livelong dive into civil and combat flight simulators. He has been involved in a few communities, but only started being active around the mid 2010s. Joined as a Spanish to English translator in 2017, he has been active as the co-founder and writer ever since. Twitter | Discord: Cubeboy
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