7 hours ago
Hampton gamer brings ‘Complex Loss' to virtual reality world
Jamal Johnson was chilling at his buddy's house in Hampton in 2022 when his friend casually asked if he'd like to try out a new virtual reality gaming system, all hooked up in the living room.
Yeah man, Johnson said. If his friend was into it, sure, why not give it a go?
So he slipped a VR headset over his forehead and across his eyes, and the real world disappeared as he was transported into a virtual 3D realm.
When he raised his arms in his friend's living room, his character's arms went up in the game. He turned his head, and his field of vision in the game rotated from left to right, he said. It felt like magic.
'At that instant, I was like, 'I gotta learn this. I gotta figure this out.' I was like, 'Nothing else matters to me anymore.''
The experience prompted Johnson, 44, to change the entire business model of his Hampton-based company, the Music Video Training Center. For more than a decade, the company had been making iOS apps and helping artists, private firms and government agencies produce videos. But in only a few minutes of wearing that headset, Johnson saw virtual reality as the future of media — and, thus, the future of his company.
And after several years of experimentation and learning the necessary programming, Johnson and his creative team released, early this year, their first VR game. It's called 'Complex Loss.'
Complex Loss can be played on the Meta Quest 2 or Meta Quest 3, which are standalone virtual headset systems, made by Meta Platforms, Inc., the company founded by Facebook-creator Mark Zuckerberg.
Anyone who plays the game, plays as its main character. You, in the game, are an asset recovery agent sent on a mission to take back a business complex that's been stolen from the fictional RCM Corporation by a former, disgruntled employee.
The game, which has received positive reviews online, has 10 levels. Each one is a different room, floor or outside area at the corporate office building such as a loading dock, recreation room and robotics lab.
Its basic premise is based on the concept of an escape room, and in each level, the game's player finds clues that will unlock further progression.
A player walks around the virtual environment picking up objects and uses a special scanning tool on their wrist to log recovered assets, and later confronts and fights bad guys.
With its creators' previous film experience, the game sound effects are particularly unique.
From beeps of pushed buttons to footsteps on different kinds of floorings to the thudding of objects a player can pick up and throw against walls, desks or anywhere of their choosing in the immersive-virtual space, each sound is a customized creation by the gamemakers.
Complex Loss was recently spotlighted by SideQuest as one of the best VR games by independent gamemakers of summer 2025, and its release was a major step forward for a local media technology company — co-owned by Johnson and his 26-year-old partner, Dashawn Tucker-Bailey, from Newport News who joined the organization in 2018.
The Music Video Training Center has had a hand in the creation of 21 films since Johnson founded it in 2008 and around 70 music videos that include MTV and BET credits, including a couple starring members of hip-hop supergroup the Wu-Tang Clan.
In his first venture into video games in the mid 2010s, Johnson designed an Android app game, 'The Struggler,' for Hampton University that encouraged financial literacy. In it, a gamer plays as a 'struggling' person who must run down a street while being chased by bill collectors, Johnson said.
'Now each bill collector had a different power. So pink would be child support. If you got hit by child support, then money you had already collected to help you progress through the levels would be taken away.'
It was a far simpler programming job than what's required for a virtual reality game.
To create Complex Loss, Johnson teamed with his lead programer Robert Connell, who lives in Georgia.
'Our idea was that we already had a formula that everybody likes and enjoys in an escape room,' Connell said, 'so now how far can we take that within an immersive VR environment?'
Building on the momentum of Complex Loss, Connell and Johnson have already begun work on its sequels with a plan to create a brand new series of escape room VR games.
Colin Warren-Hicks, 919-818-8139,
