Dev Takes a Career Break to Become a Meme

Ron’s original avatar. Picture by Ryo.

It’s been a while since Ron posted anything on our Discord or made any clear public statements regarding VRChat team and the development progress in general, which could possibly mean he’s very busy a the moment.

However, it just happens so that during what seemed like a complete absence of one of our favorite developers known for his alien avatar for over a month, a meme called “Howard the Alien” began spreading after the disappearing act of Ron the Alien.

There were several assumptions based on these facts that Howard the Alien and Ron are the same person, which led us to asking random users of VRChat if they think it’s true. Apparently, many of them, including okano who responded, “Wait, they aren’t?” are convinced that Ron changed his name to “Howard”, and now he’s taking over the Internet by being used a new meme material across the web.

Recently, Tate Diabeetus posted a message on Discord saying, “Howard makes less sense than Knuckles. How does stuff like this get popular so quick?” Even though there are multiple theories explaining that there must have been a group of people involved in the production of this meme, it is also quite possible that Ron (AKA Howard) was involved in the process of promoting this meme, which plays an important role for his PR campaign.

“Right, this whole time we thought he was working on the game, but he’s far more genius than we thought,” said a user at The Great Pug. “This meme is just a part of his plan to promote himself and VRChat, ‘cause, you know, the Knuckles meme is dead. There’s no VRChat with no memes.”

If that is true, our fears have been confirmed and the amount of VRChat memes is so limited the devs have to create new ones by themselves to maintain their audience’s interest.

On the other hand, this inspired many others to create their versions of Howard the Alien. Some of them will probably get banned for impersonation of the VRChat developer, but for now, let’s enjoy the meme while it lasts.