Rick Treweek Wins Emmy for Cape Town VR Theatre

Cape Town artist Rick Treweek won the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Emerging Media Program on September 5, 2026, for “Uncanny Alley: A New Day,” a live theatre production he co-created that plays out entirely inside a virtual reality world.

The win put a small, artist-led production ahead of studio-backed competition. Uncanny Alley: A New Day beat Blumhouse Enhanced Cinema, from Blumhouse and NBC, and The World of Fallout, from Amazon and Bethesda, for the category.

Treweek accepted the award on stage in Los Angeles alongside the team from Ferryman Collective, a nonprofit theatre company based in the city that partnered with his Cape Town studio, Virtual Worlds Company, to build and stage the show. “This one is for home,” he said.

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A show performed live inside VRChat

“Uncanny Alley: A New Day” is not a film or a game. It is staged live, in real time, inside VRChat, a social virtual reality platform, with small groups of up to six audience members dropped into a single performance as participants rather than spectators.

Two professional actors play 15 characters between them, switching roles mid-scene while operating show cues through a hidden interface that changes the environment without breaking the illusion. Audience members take on the role of escaped detainees fleeing Adaptive Learning Industries, a fictional corporation preparing to erase its citizens’ memories, and must navigate the story while avoiding capture.

The production runs inside Uncanny Alley, an original virtual cyberpunk city Treweek has built and developed since 2020. He created the first version of it while living in a flat in Johannesburg during South Africa’s early COVID-19 lockdowns. Its first narrative chapter, The Search for Gh0st, premiered at Venice VR Expanded in 2021 and won the Spirit of Raindance Award the following year.

Rick Treweek: from Kokstad to a global stage

Treweek grew up on a farm in Kokstad, KwaZulu-Natal, and attended high school at Hilton College. He started his career in animation at Cape Town’s Triggerfish Studios before moving into immersive and virtual-world design under the name MetaRick.

He now lives in Kommetjie, near Cape Town, where Virtual Worlds Company is based. In his acceptance speech, Treweek framed the win as a statement about what South African creative teams can do without the infrastructure larger studios take for granted, telling the room that South African teams do not wait for perfect conditions and that his crew built the show despite the country’s rolling power cuts.

The Outstanding Emerging Media Program category recognizes interactive and immersive projects that fall outside traditional film and television formats, from VR experiences to interactive documentaries. A full list of nominees and winners is available on the Television Academy’s official site.

A build-up of smaller wins before the Emmy

The Emmy win did not come out of nowhere. Uncanny Alley: A New Day had already premiered at Venice Immersive, the XR section of the Venice International Film Festival, and gone on to screen at SXSW, Raindance Immersive, the NewImages Festival and the Augmented World Expo. It picked up three nominations at the XRMust XR Awards in 2024, for best sound design, best interactive or performance work, and best spatial design.

Following the Emmy win, the show’s live VRChat run was extended through August 27, giving new audiences a window to watch it before Virtual Worlds Company and Ferryman Collective decide on their next scheduled dates.

Ferryman Collective, founded in 2020, focuses specifically on building live theatre for virtual reality, developing work around embodiment and audience agency rather than adapting existing stage plays into VR. Uncanny Alley: A New Day is the highest-profile production to come out of that approach so far, and the Emmy is the company’s first.

Because the show runs inside VRChat rather than a proprietary app, anyone with a compatible VR headset, or even a desktop computer running VRChat’s non-VR mode, can log in during a scheduled session. That accessibility is part of what distinguishes it from higher-budget immersive projects built on closed, single-platform hardware.

What the win means for South Africa’s immersive-media scene

South Africa’s tech and creative sectors have produced international successes before, largely in gaming and animation. An Emmy win in an emerging-media category, taken from studio-backed competition, signals that a Cape Town-based studio can compete directly against Los Angeles and New York productions rather than only supplying outsourced production work to them.