A MOST AGREEABLE PASTIME

At Play Expo Blackpool I met up with Simon Marston, who’s something of a Virtuality megafan. His garage is stuffed full of 199os VR kit, and he’s become an expert at keeping these fragile machines running.

He brought along his two Virtuality 1000 series VR pods to the show, and he reckons that these are the last two working examples of this model in existence, although one of them continued to play up throughout the day, and may well be on its last legs unless he can find a vital replacement part. The 1000 series is based on an Amiga 3000 and dates from the turn of the 1990s, whereas the later 2000 series was based on a 486 PC and was produced in greater numbers.

It was fascinating to experience 1990s VR after all this time. I remember playing on one of these machines many years ago, but as I was only young at the time, I remember that my fragile noodle neck struggled under the weight of the headset and I was quite confused about what was going on. Going back to the machines as an adult, I was pretty damned impressed at how good the tracking is – despite the low frame rate and chunky polygons, the experience was incredibly immersive. They were definitely onto something back then.

In the end though, it was the price that did these things in – each machine cost several tens of thousands of pounds, not to mention the cost of an attendant to help people into and out of the things, and arcade owners had to charge an accordingly high price to punters.

I wrote about my meeting with Simon for Kotaku UK:

The Man Who is Keeping 1990s Virtual Reality Machines Alive

He’s truly the font of all knowledge on 1990s VR – you can catch up with him on Facebook or visit his website here.