From Sneakers to Startups: ASICS Ventures' Joe Pace on Building a VR Sport from Scratch

1. Why a Shoe Company Is Making a VR Game

ASICS’s mission has always been about movement — "a sound mind in a sound body." That doesn’t just mean shipping sneakers. It means creating habits. With DISC, they're extending that mission into the digital world, and not just by gamifying workouts.

“We’re not porting real-world sports into VR. We’re designing a sport that only exists in VR.”

Instead of mimicking soccer or tennis, DISC takes cues from air hockey and arcade games — simple to pick up, hard to master, and built for short, high-intensity sessions. Think of it as the Beat Saber of competitive sports.

2. Community Before Code: The Power of Discord

Before the first line of code was written, ASICS launched a Discord server, not a game. That wasn’t a marketing gimmick — it was a product strategy.

“We didn’t want to build in a vacuum. We invited players in before the game existed.”

The goal? Learn from players, build with players, and validate assumptions before investing too heavily in features no one asked for. Today, that Discord has grown into a passionate 3,000+ person community that shaped everything from game mechanics to feature prioritization.

3. LiveOps and the Unexpected Advantage of VR

DISC is a LiveOps product in every sense — evolving weekly, driven by player feedback, and designed for experimentation. But VR adds something traditional platforms don’t: physicality and presence.

“People don’t just show up to play. They show up to talk.”

One of Joe’s biggest surprises was the social stickiness of VR. Players log in not just to compete, but to hang out — sometimes with complete strangers. That human connection is baked into the product vision, and it’s shaping DISC’s roadmap.

4. Playing in the Dark: Building in a 50% Opacity World

Joe likens building DISC to operating at “50% opacity.” You see some data. You feel some instincts. But nothing is crystal clear. That’s the challenge of inventing a category.

“We’re not iterating on an existing genre. We’re building something people haven’t seen before.”

Instead of waiting for perfect clarity, the DISC team launched in stages: announce, community-build, private beta, public launch. Each step fed the next with insight — and limited risk.

5. What Studio Leaders Can Learn from ASICS

• Build the room before the game. Community isn’t a post-launch perk — it’s a pre-launch priority.
• VR is more social than you think. Design for movement, but expect conversation.
• Play your game every day. Joe and his team dogfood DISC constantly. If they’re not playing, they’re not learning.
• Don’t chase polish. Chase feedback. DISC launched quietly, iterated fast, and used community as a compass.

🔥 Callout Box

🗣️ “People don’t want to hear from a brand. But they’ll listen to another player who’s been in the game for months.” — Joe Pace, VP at ASICS Ventures

Conclusion:

Asics didn’t just drop into VR. They brought their mission with them — and rewrote the playbook along the way. DISC isn’t just a new sport. It’s a blueprint for how fitness, gaming, and LiveOps can collide.

🎯 If you're a studio lead or LiveOps manager: Ask yourself — are you building with your players, or just for them?