Oculus to give free, special edition headsets to early Kickstarter backers

By Jon Martindale January 5, 2016

Were you one of the 6,955 early backers of the Oculus Rift Kickstarter campaign, who pledged enough for a DK1? If so, Oculus has a special announcement (that is of course in no way designed to disrupt the HTC Vive Pre debut): You’re getting a free “Kickstarter edition,” of the Oculus Rift CV1.

The announcement was made on the Oculus Kickstarter page, which although much less commonly updated, has continued to exist over the past few years, despite the company’s buyout by Facebook and move away from original financing plans. This announcement was a big one though, and saw the developers, founders, and executives coming forward to issue a big thank you to the original backers. Without them, none of this would have been possible.

“On August 1, 2012, we launched a Kickstarter campaign to seed the development of a groundbreaking virtual reality headset – Oculus Rift. Tomorrow, we’ll be opening Rift pre-orders on Oculus.com,” begins the address, waxing lyrically about how far Oculus and consumer grade virtual reality has come in just a few short years.

“As a small token of our appreciation for your support, all Kickstarter backers who pledged for a Rift development kit will get a free Kickstarter Edition Oculus Rift!”

It’s not clear at this time how much, if at all, the “Kickstarter Edition” of the Oculus Rift CV1 will differ from the standard edition that we will all get a chance to pre-order on January 6, but we do know that it will come with the free bundled games that everyone else is getting: Lucky’s Tale and EVE: Valkyrie.

This announcement comes a day before the official pre-orders go live for the Oculus Rift consumer edition, though there are many details yet to be announced, including the final price, accessory list, and an eventual release date of the Oculus Touch — though we do know the motion controls will debut sometime in the second half of the year.

Were you one of the early Kickstarter backers? If not, do you have your card standing by for when the pre-orders go live tomorrow? We sure do.

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