Go read this story about how the Video Game History Foundation resurrected a lost Sega VR headset

In the annals of video games, there are countless numbers of products – canceled games, discarded hardware – that make it seem like they are lost in time. But most of the time, they are just forgotten, not lost. And that’s where the Video Game History Foundation comes in. As the name suggests, the foundation is an organization that preserves the history of video games, piece by piece. Today they have outdone themselves: The foundation’s digital curator, Rich Whitehouse, wrote a lengthy blog post about how he managed to resurrect a canceled game – Nuclear rush – which was intended for the Sega Genesis VR headset. Additionally: Whitehouse has successfully emulated the hardware of the Sega VR headset to work on current generation VR headsets.

Image: The Foundation for the History of Video Games

The Sega VR headset, which never made it beyond a prototype stage, was an engineering marvel of the early 90s. “Equipped with a high-frequency inertial measurement unit and two LCD screens, the headset Sega VR shares a lot of fundamental design with today’s VR headsets, ”writes Whitehouse. “This design was nothing short of revolutionary when Sega officially unveiled the unit to journalists and retailers in 1993, promising to innovate on the frontier of virtual reality. They miraculously hit their goal of $ 200 thanks to technology licensed from a startup called Ono-Sendai, whose patented tracking solution could be manufactured for just $ 1. ”

Whitehouse’s journey to revive both the game and (a software implementation of) the headset began with another conservative colleague, Dylan Mansfield of Gaming Alexandria, who had made contact with Kenneth Hurley, co-founder of a games that developed a game for Sega VR. This game was Nuclear rush. (His vanity: the year is 2032, electricity is in demand, but fossil fuels are exhausted. You are a pilot and your mission is to acquire radioactive fuel. Very cyberpunk.)

Hurley unearthed a 26-year-old CD-ROM that miraculously contained the source code Nuclear rush but also tools for other Genesis games he had worked on. And this is where the Whitehouse adventure began.

The Sega VR effort is another offshoot of the Foundation’s Source project, which began by delving deep into the guts of the legendary game LucasArts. The secret of monkey island. Whitehouse’s contribution adds to this larger work: he embarks on some pretty deep technical challenges he faced while making the game and headset code work, and, satisfactorily, details the solutions he has. proposed. At the end of the play, you will learn how the software was assembled and designed by Sega itself. But the best part is that you can actually download a ROM from Nuclear rush and the software Whitehouse wrote to allow the game to play on modern VR hardware – which shows the game as it would have looked if it had ever been released with Sega VR.

Watching Whitehouse play the reconstructed game is like watching someone take a different path through history. And indeed, the journey is less about what really happened than about what could have been.