Quell is launching the Quell Impact fitness gaming platform to make exercise more engaging, enjoyable, and accessible.
The London-based fitness gaming developer and publisher has been working on the dedicated gaming platform for four years and the Quell Impact is debuting with a boxing game.
The Quell Impact pairs exhilarating gameplay with athlete-grade resistance bands and camera-less motion tracking to deliver immersive, high-intensity, full-body workouts at home.
The company had a closed beta phase featuring Quell’s first 5,000 pre-order customers, and now it is making the product available worldwide. It costs $329 for the platform and $8.48 a month for the subscription.
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The Impact launches with the studio’s first gaming title, Shardfall, where you punch enemies in a fantasy game setting. Created by a team of developers from Sony, Nintendo, Meta, EA, Activision-Blizzard, Ubisoft, Disney and Zwift, Shardfall letss players to exercise by sprinting, leaping and fighting their way through a fantasy world.
The game is a roguelike title, repurposed with core loop that is appropriate for fitness. Once you die, you get started again. The better you perform, the faster you go through the action RPG, which resembles the gameplay of Hades.
The authored single-player content can go on for multiple months in 20-minute sessions. It has an extended tutorial, and Quell plans to update the content often. Over time, the company will add asynchronous social features like leagues where you can compete, rise in the ranks or get relegated.
Quell CEO Cameron Brookhouse said in an interview with GamesBeat that Quell sets itself apart from the competition by placing high-quality fitness at the core of its experience; players burn more than 600 calories an hour through HIIT workouts tailored to their fitness level. Besides punching, you can get a full body workout with squats, running and jumps.
Quell is on a mission to revolutionize the way we experience exercise, taking the “work” out of uninspiring workouts and replacing it with adrenaline-pumping adventure. By harnessing the immersive power of gaming, Quell motivates players to stick to their fitness routines, push themselves harder, and consistently hit their goals.
Quell’s launch title, Shardfall, transports players to a beautiful world steeped in danger and sets them on an epic adventure to save it. In each 20-minute session, players run through enchanted landscapes, leap, duck and sprint their way past obstacles, and unleash hooks, jabs and uppercuts to defeat the game’s roster of 100+ unique enemies. Conquering these challenges earns rewards which players can use to upgrade their character, allowing them to take on harder trials.
The company combines AI, deep fitness data and procedural generation to deliver an endless array of immersive workouts perfectly tailored to each players’ fitness level and goals. This personalization, and Quell’s customizable resistance bands make the workouts more intense.
Analytics also gives deeper insights into each players’ performance and shows improvements over time, allowing them to track their progress and understand where to focus their efforts.
The game also has social play, where Quell players can compete with each other to advance into higher leagues of competitive play and earn powerful rewards, motivating them to push their limits and keep
progressing towards their fitness goals.
As for content, Quell said it will be releasing regular updates to Shardfall, featuring new game content and more ways of working out, as well as introducing brand-new games which focus on additional forms of fitness.
“At Quell, we believe that exercise should be something people can’t wait to come home to do, and play is at the heart of that mission,” Brookhouse said. “The Impact is designed to let anyone fall in love with fitness, smashing their goals and building a healthy, life-long habit.”
He added, ““People have wanted real fitness games for decades. Quell is taking the sector beyond gimmicks, delivering intense, full-body exercise combined with exceptionally immersive gaming experiences. We couldn’t be happier with the feedback from our closed beta phase, and are incredibly excited to get Quell into the hands of players around the world.”
Quell Impact platform
The Quell Impact platform comes with:
- two controllers featuring haptics, heart-rate monitors and motion sensor
- one chest unit featuring additional motion sensor
- two resistance bands and wrist straps with stronger bands available for purchase
- a belt with a breathable, washable design and non-slip technology
- a USB-C charging dock
- a WiFi connection hub
- one wash bag
The platform is available now at £299 ($329) with free shipping to the U.S., Canada, United Kindom, European Union and EEA.
Quell membership can be purchased from as little as £6.66/$8.48 a month and provides unlimited access to all Quell games, content updates, fitness analytics and social play, for up to five friends and family profiles per account.
The Impact requires a compatible PC or Mac computer to play, as well as a TV or display. You can stream the imagery to the display. There are 13 sensors in the platform, which is wearable and has real resistance bands that make punching into the air tougher.
While the first game focuses on boxing, other exercises will come later.
Origins
Brookhouse said the company was started by a trio of friends from school about three weeks before the COVID lockdowns hit. They interviewed people about their exercise habits and what stuck for the long term. They said they accessed whatever they could, and liked it better when it was fun. They found that most people hate running, but tolerate it for the exercise.
“We asked if we could take the things that make exercise fun and strip away the barriers, with a balance of skill, chance and immersion,” he said. “We wanted it to be just like the gym, but with something more immersive.”
The company went through the Y Combinator incubator, and the team raised $18 million to date. The founders wanted to move away from gamification, which is a gimmicky sort of way to make activities game-like. Rather, they wanted something that was a true game that could immerse people in another world.
“We wanted to combine it with real exercise, not a trade-off versus the gym but where you could burn 600 calories,” Brookhouse said.
But they found that people didn’t like virtual reality, as half the people had motion sickness when trying to play in motion-based games. The headsets were heavy and make you more sweaty, reducing the time you can spend in the game.
So the team went with a more traditional screen and built a system for recognizing motion from the ground up.
“We wanted to move away from gamification and make it feel like combat,” Brookhouse said. “You are just having fun and you don’t think about it in the moment. We wanted to build a world with narrative progression, as fitness is a commitment over time.”
The team has about 50 people and it has raised $18 million to date.
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