A glimpse of early 90s' VR on UK tech and video game review show Bad Influence in late 1992 during its first series. Always very cool seeing those immense Virtuality headsets - and the kind of games you could play on them! Going to start hashing in the old TV and ad bits I share with #VideoBytes! - ThreadSky

sharkabytes.bsky.social • 155 days ago

A glimpse of early 90s' VR on UK tech and video game review show Bad Influence in late 1992 during its first series.

Always very cool seeing those immense Virtuality headsets - and the kind of games you could play on them!

Going to start hashing in the old TV and ad bits I share with #VideoBytes!

Comments

shand.bsky.social•155 days ago

darktetsuya.bsky.social•155 days ago

takes me back to my first go at 'Dactyl Nightmare' back in the mid 90s! was unlike anything I'd ever seen before! haven't had a chance to try the modern day versions of it, hopefully someday.

weirdguy.bsky.social•155 days ago

Way back when, they had those at Trocadero. Played them a few times.

topsycretin.bsky.social•154 days ago

If you're curious, I'd look up "Rosetintedspectrum" on youtube, he's done an abridged watch through of every episode of Bad Influence

sharkabytes.bsky.social•154 days ago

Oh, yeah! I've watched his Breaking Bad Influence vids. One of my favourite YouTubers.

abyssalmouth.bsky.social•155 days ago

This is really cool. I've never heard about this though. None of the videos I've watched covering VR's history have ever mentioned it so I assume it must've been pretty niche. Is there anywhere I can learn more about this? I'm really interested.

sharkabytes.bsky.social•155 days ago

Ah, have you checked this out?

abyssalmouth.bsky.social•155 days ago

Not yet! Thanks! I'll watch this today whenever I have some free time.

veximmortalis.bsky.social•153 days ago

I remember thinking these looked so damn cool and couldn't wait for the technology to mature. Many years later I have my own, modern set and get motion sickness just turning around :( Absolutely gutted

sharkabytes.bsky.social•153 days ago

Ah, that's a shame! I have a feeling I'd have the same issues with VR as I can often get vertigo from being high up in first-person games.

I used to feel properly unwell from playing the PS4 version of Dying Light and climbing up the pylons with its variable framerate.

cptspaffy.bsky.social•155 days ago

Why does this interest me 1000% than anything modern vr does?!?

parynoid.bsky.social•153 days ago

JESUS WEPT!

romston.bsky.social•144 days ago

😅 The headset is huuuuge! 🤣

friendlybuddy.bsky.social•155 days ago

I remember playing something very similar to this at Disney World around 2000. I remember it being more frustrating than fun!

rseymour.bsky.social•155 days ago

I played one of those (maybe next gen? In the US). 2 player. The kid I played against was probably 11 and I was 13? I won and he was so mad.

changa.gay•73 days ago

I got to play Virtuality a few times back in the early 90s. Once in Massachusetts and Later in Kansas City. Got to play a few rounds of Dactyl Nightmare. The early days I remember it being run on Amiga 3000's.

I saved one of the flyers from back in the day.

changa.gay•73 days ago

Somebody did port the Dactyl Nightmare level to VrChat.

https://vrchat.com/home/world/wrld_673fef24-e391-4297-967b-542b1909a2ac

poisonkel.bsky.social•155 days ago

@brunorataque.bsky.social ce ja deve ter visto, mas: simplesmente vr vintage

amff.bsky.social•155 days ago

Local Bowling alley had the Virtuality Tank game.

It was complete guff, an absurdly pre-AM2 low poly world that barely had the compute power left over to spawn an enemy.

Imagine a racing sim with no road to indicate the speed and thats pretty much it.

radicaldreamers.bsky.social•155 days ago

That first game looks terrific. I actually love VR paired with polygonal graphics, looks so cool

indigovoltage.bsky.social•154 days ago

How is this older than Super Mario 64????????

succupony.bsky.social•111 days ago

I remember catching the occasional episode of this and just being enamored at all the Sega stuff I would never be able to afford.

Because I'm 100,000 years old I also remember paying extra for magazines that had VHS tapes of game trailers, tips, cheats etc. Fuck I wish I'd kept some of those

sharkabytes.bsky.social•110 days ago

I've got a handful of the magazine VHS tapes I picked up off eBay, and, yeah, they're really cool things to dig through in retrospect.

succupony.bsky.social•111 days ago

I remember seeing Eric Chahi's Another World for the first time on one of those tapes and that memory is burned into my brain forever.

pheebs.is-extremely.gay•154 days ago

There's a compuer museum somewhere in the UK that has some of these and you can play em.
I forget where, but I wanna go so bad

alert74.bsky.social•155 days ago

I remember the head and neck pain at DisneyQuest was not cool. 🤕

kevincow.bsky.social•155 days ago

What's crazy to think about is that this was a year before the original Doom came out. The FPS wasn't really even an established genre yet, and they were already trying to do it in VR.

sharkabytes.bsky.social•155 days ago

Yeah, that's a good point with that last game showcased; it really does sound like a more modern deathmatch pvp game. it's always amazing to see ahead-of-its-time stuff trying to be done with older tech like this.

patter.bsky.social•155 days ago

They had some of those at arcades, so anyone could rock up & have a go

harlequinskwerl.bsky.social•154 days ago

I remember well playing it in Nottingham of all places

adawolf.bsky.social•155 days ago

does anyone remember that VR TV game that was on TV for a bit in the 90's, I'm sure Criag Charles hosted it...
This reminds me of that

sharkabytes.bsky.social•155 days ago

Ah, yeah, as someone already suggested, it was CyberZone.

adawolf.bsky.social•155 days ago

Optimistic and Janky by todays standards but was amazing to my younger self to see and thinking it was so advanced, whats possible these days is incredible compared to those days

vulpeculafox.bsky.social•155 days ago

Cyberzone or something like that?

patter.bsky.social•155 days ago

Sounds more like a Patrick Moore thing (he presented games master) but he'd be hard to mistake for Craig Charles

adawolf.bsky.social•155 days ago

naa was definately not that, I remember Games master very well

fuzzweed.co.uk•154 days ago

Virtually real

cgreb.bsky.social•155 days ago

I remember playing one at an arcade that had you shooting at Tron-style pterodactyls

weirdautumns.bsky.social•155 days ago

is there a list of the games that were available in early VR? I watched a video on some retro PC stuff yesterday and the VR games looked neat but i cant find any information on them :(

mecha-bunny.bsky.social•155 days ago

This is a list for all the Virtuality games. It's complete AFAIK. There were other early VR systems but Virtuality was the biggest. I'm not sure any other ones made it to market (unless you count the Virtual Boy).

https://www.reddit.com/r/virtualreality/comments/63prjz/retro_vr_full_list_of_virtuality_games_from_the/

weirdautumns.bsky.social•155 days ago

yo this is awesome thanks!!

mattybuk.bsky.social•155 days ago

Those W Industries VR pods were amazing. I played the boxing and the teradactyl one. That was the era of the Cyberzone on BBC2!

armandorivera.bsky.social•155 days ago

My first year of college, some group came by the school with these Virtuality VR pods for us students to mess with for the day. They had Dactyl Nightmare and VTOL. VTOL was pretty cool as admirer of flight sims.
It was my first VR experience. Best of all, it was free.

tripmaverick.bsky.social•155 days ago

Theres a twitch channel that screens all these old tech shows.

bottlecapp.bsky.social•155 days ago

Hoo boy, the Enterprise D hallway really does some work dating the vid.

So who wants to turn this into a Skyrim mod?

factolvictor.bsky.social•155 days ago

Oh, for the love of the goddess, look at the size of that headset. This demo must have caused several problems in this person's cervical spine.

maviscruet.bsky.social•122 days ago

A Virtuality head set is the only VR I've ever tried. The one I used wasn't quite that big, but it was hefty. And not enjoyable.

pastyistasty.bsky.social•155 days ago

Have there been any efforts to get these running on modern hardware?

sharkabytes.bsky.social•155 days ago

The only thing I've found is a news post of a modern rights holder for some of the old VR games wanting to bring them to modern headsets, but I don't think anything has come of it yet.

https://blog.adafruit.com/2020/08/25/virtuality-90s-game-ports-coming-to-modern-vr-headsets-arttuesday/

ekron-vulture.bsky.social•155 days ago

I used one of these, or very similar in Canada in 2001. Then they shipped the machines to Leicester in around 2016 and I got to do it. Again.

Small world

shirtie.bsky.social•154 days ago

This and Gamester gave me my Video Game fix in my early teenage years, SNES+ Street Fighter Turbo

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