# Rec Room's End 'Surreal' To Shawn Whiting After 8 Years Building Community

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/good-vr-podcast-7726864/rec-room-s-end-surreal-to-shawn-whiting-after-8-years-building-community
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/good-vr-podcast-7726864/rec-room-s-end-surreal-to-shawn-whiting-after-8-years-building-community.md
Podcast: [Good VR Podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/good-vr-podcast-7726864)
Published: 2026-05-23T10:30:00+00:00
Episode link: https://www.goodvirtualreality.com/p/rec-rooms-end-surreal-to-shawn-whiting
Audio file: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/198710749/4e70be0074cdb565843e976e9f8914b7.mp3
Processing state: not_requested
JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/good-vr-podcast-7726864/episodes/rec-room-s-end-surreal-to-shawn-whiting-after-8-years-building-community
Duration seconds: 4219

## Resource

From June 1, 2026 a place that’s been the foundation of VR for many ceases to be. The end of Rec Room is still “surreal” for one of VR’s “OG” supporters and a core member of the team building the project for more than eight years. “There can’t be a world without Rec Room,” Shawn Whiting said on the Good VR Podcast. “It doesn’t seem real.” From his memories playing Dreadhalls to co-founding Convrge to the spike in Rec Room players seen through the COVID pandemic, Whiting talks through a journey more than a decade in the making. “The mood in the community is super somber, it’s sad,” Whiting said. “You can go to rec.net and export all your photos and, of course, you start looking through all of them and you’re like, ‘man this photo was taken in 2016 or 17’ and you’re looking at all the early games in the first rooms people were creating and it gets very nostalgic. It’s definitely an emotional time and people are starting up archiving projects so people are going in and taking a bunch of video and downloading the rooms and scanning the rooms and turning them into gaussian splat things that can be revisited.” The conversation between Whiting and I is one of the deepest I’ve been able to bring to the Good VR Podcast as he’s able to speak about his time at the company in a way founders and CEOs can’t. As an early member of the team managing the space between founders and a growing team of engineers and designers, his role saw him attempting to navigate decisions made at a level above his pay grade. Meaning that of all people I could speak with about the closure of Rec Room, Whiting worked there long enough and at a high enough level to both understand the community dynamics and forces affecting its failure, while also not operating in a position where he’d need to deflect or…

## Actions

- request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/good-vr-podcast-7726864/episodes/rec-room-s-end-surreal-to-shawn-whiting-after-8-years-building-community/transcription-requests` — Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.
- read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/good-vr-podcast-7726864/rec-room-s-end-surreal-to-shawn-whiting-after-8-years-building-community.md` — Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.

A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed.

## Transcript

Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.