Ryan Engle and James Wright
Bringing virtual reality to golf
From the golf course to indoor simulators to Topgolf and video games, there are so many ways for people to play golf. With Golf+, Ryan Engle (above right) and James Wright are changing the game with virtual reality.
“VR really has the promise to get golf into every household in the world,” said Wright, president of Golf+.
Launched in 2020 by founder and CEO Engle, Golf+ is a virtual reality game playable on the Meta Quest. Gamers and golfers alike can play dozens of golf courses, including iconic venues like Pebble Beach and St Andrews, from the comfort of their own homes.
Engle loved video games growing up, but his parents didn’t let him own his own games until he was around 12 years old.
“That was a battle so I went over to my friends’ places and played their video games,” Engle said.
In high school, Engle started working with video game code and at Virginia Tech he was in the video game developers club. However, he never thought this would be his job.
“I was completely convinced I was not going to go into the video-game industry and that I was gonna do more serious apps,” Engle said.
And that’s what he did out of college, working software development jobs for various companies. But Engle had a clear goal.
“I was always thinking this is training for me to start my own thing in the future,” Engle said.
One day Engle was playing the best golf of his life. But there was one problem: he wasn’t making any putts. Engle had a thought: what if I could use augmented reality to help read greens?
In 2009, he founded Rengler Studios, a company that self-published games and apps for the iPhone. But Engle quickly realized that he knew nothing about distribution and marketing.
“People aren’t going to accidentally find your product no matter how great it is,” he said.
So in 2010, Engle shut down Rengler and got a job at Mutual Mobile, a company that built apps for other companies. Engle says he was around the 10th employee there, and, over the next two-and-a-half years, he watched it grow to about 300.
“Through that process I learned a lot about everything else that goes into running a successful business,” he said.
In 2012, Engle co-founded binocular, a company that worked with virtual and augmented reality. While he’d worked with virtual reality for a year after college, this was the first time he’d worked with VR on the consumer side. Engle was intrigued, but binocular shut down just a year after it was founded.
Engle got to work and, in 2018, founded Golf Scope Inc., an iPhone app that worked exactly how he intended it to. But about a year after launching, Engle realized that Golf Scope wasn’t a big enough business opportunity. Then, the Oculus Quest launched: a personal, relatively affordable VR headset that didn’t require all the extra equipment VR used to.
This was what Engle was looking for.
"No one had a good golf experience in VR,” Engle thought. “Let’s go all in.”
Golf+ first launched in mid-2020 with only putting and added the full-swing experience a little over a year later. Very quickly, people started to take notice. One of these people was Wright.
“I played it for a couple weeks and I was blown away by it,” Wright said.
Since Wright joined Golf+ in 2022, investors such as Rory McIlroy and Tom Brady have contributed. The game also announced a partnership with the PGA Tour late that same year.
Like Engle, Wright loved video games growing up. His parents worked in sales, trading and finance but Wright wasn’t keen to follow them into that world. Instead, he chose to study math with a minor in theology at Georgetown.
“I always had a bit of an eye towards that [business] path but I always tried to keep it at arm’s length, kind of hoping something else was going to happen for me,” Wright said.
Yet during his junior year, Wright scored a summer internship with Goldman Sachs. He started full time in 2011 and worked there until 2019, becoming the vice president of structured product sales.
But Wright wanted a change.
“What can you do to build a bit of a more meaningful life,” he wondered.
Wright moved to Austin, Texas, in 2019 and earned an MBA at the University of Texas in 2021. His first full-time job after graduating was as the director of finance and operations at WIN Reality, a company that uses VR for baseball and softball training.
“That was the first time I ever put on a VR headset,” Wright said. “I was blown away by the technology and it lit my imagination on fire about what’s possible.”
And when Engle launched the full-swing Golf+ experience in 2021, Wright was hooked from day one. Realizing Engle lived in Austin, too, Wright reached out and the two played golf together. After they discussed the game’s early success. Wright was impressed.
“Within those first six weeks [after the full-swing experience launched] I think we had give or take half a million people playing Golf+,” Wright said.
Wright knew he wanted to be a part of the project and could help Engle raise money. Since Wright joined Golf+ in 2022, investors such as Rory McIlroy and Tom Brady have contributed. The game also announced a partnership with the PGA Tour late that same year.
As VR technology continues to evolve, so will Golf+ with more realistic graphics and a truer-to-life swing feel. Soon, players will be able to use real putters. Engle hopes one day players will be able to swing real clubs.
“Our long-term goal is to start to bridge the gap between swinging a real club at a real ball to where we are today, where a lot of people play with a controller,” Engle said.
Everett Munez
