Lost ‘Sega VR’ game discovered, made playable on modern VR headsets

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Sega VR was made, heralded and pushed as Sega's next big thing, until its unceremonious cancellation in 1994. Twenty-six years later, we finally see how it worked. — Enlarge / Sega VR was made, heralded and pushed as Sega’s next big thing, until its unceremonious cancellation in 1994. Twenty-six years later, we finally see how it worked.

Sega

One of Sega’s most mysterious products, the canceled Sega VR headset, finally appeared in “playable” form on Friday thanks to a team of game history curators. It’s the story of a ROM discovery, a research of its source code, and efforts to not only rebuild the game, but also adapt existing Genesis and Mega Drive emulators to translate virtual reality calls from current PC headsets.

The story, as posted on the Video Game History Foundation website, begins with a ROM discovery by Dylan Mansfield at Gaming Alexandria. The game in question, Nuclear rush, was one of four games announced for Sega VR, a headset system designed to plug into standard Genesis and Mega Drive consoles.

Not quite 72 Hz …

Gamers in that era have likely heard of Sega VR, as the game publisher’s PR campaign included numerous mentions in gaming magazines, a public reveal at the 1993 Summer CES, and even a segment on ABC. Nightline. But the ambitious device, which was slated to launch at just $ 199, was quietly canceled, and former Sega chairman Tom Kalinske finally confirmed why: Researchers found the device was making a huge percentage of testers sick of headache and dizziness.

See: Nuclear rush, one of Sega’s canceled VR games in the early ’90s.

Foundation for the History of Video Games
Its tacky intro is definitely from a certain era.

Foundation for the History of Video Games
Perhaps we are indeed on the path to a gold rush for nuclear power and weapons in the next 12 years.

Foundation for the History of Video Games
The alternate images of Nuclear rushStereoscopic display of, as translated by Richard Whitehouse in a mid-development red / blue 3D glasses implementation. It’s pretty, in a cheesy way.

Foundation for the History of Video Games
The startup message that originally got everyone excited.

Foundation for the History of Video Games
And the most useful clincher, that this ROM would actually work.

Foundation for the History of Video Games
Test on a modern VR headset.

Foundation for the History of Video Games
Image translation required to do Nuclear rush run without getting sick on modern VR headsets.

Foundation for the History of Video Games

Today’s discovery partly explains the origin of these disease symptoms. Breaking down and understanding how Sega VR games communicated with a Genesis, and therefore a Sega VR headset, Rich Whitehouse, VGHF’s digital curator, discovered the headset’s serious limitations: a simple 15Hz refresh for its stereoscopic images, as opposed to the 72Hz minimum for Oculus Quest (not to mention the 90Hz standard set by companies like HTC and Valve). Additionally, Sega VR only translates pitch and yaw motion for users’ heads, not roll – and this is in addition to the fact that the system is already limited as a three degrees of freedom (3DOF) system, which forces users to remain seated.

How did Whitehouse learn so much about the features of Sega VR so long after the add-on was gone? Ultimately, Mansfield’s daily game history errata search includes requests to various’ 90s developers for old prototypes or codes they might have tucked away in a drawer. In the case of Kenneth Hurley, who worked on Nuclear rush As part of Futurescape Productions, he went higher and sent Mansfield a CD-ROM dated August 6, 1994 – which, miraculously, had not succumbed to rot.

Whitehouse stepped in at this point to figure out how to compile the nearly complete leftover code (nicknamed “final” but not “final retail”), which required a mix of C and assembly. Among Whitehouse’s findings: Code as written only worked on certain Genesis and Mega Drive hardware revisions, depending on how it handles horizontal and vertical scrolling of sprites and assets, which needed a fix minor. Additionally, the metadata in the code hinted at a winter 1994 CES show for Sega VR that never happened.

Could have used an SVP

Although the discovered CD-ROM lacked Sega VR key files (which Whitehouse said would have been named VR.DOC and VR.TXT), Whitehouse was still able to determine how the system would have performed with 16-bit consoles. Sega VR IO reportedly revolved around the console’s second controller port – although Whitehouse’s explanation does not specify whether the console’s video output port would have been redirected to the Sega VR headset or how that would have worked. In addition, the Sega VR headset would have received two 30 Hz images, which Nuclear rush would then have split further with its 15fps refresh.

While determining how to do Nuclear rush working as a VR experience in 2020, Whitehouse spoke to the game’s lead programmer, Kevin McGrath, who confirmed that his team worked a lot on Sega VR without actually having a headset to test – and they invented a test that had The game’s video output flickers between two computer monitors to see how it could do the same with two headphone images. Another game programmer from the Sega VR era, Alex Smith, has confirmed that the team working on Outlaw Racing had never even worked with a prototype helmet before their project was canned.

The rest of Whitehouse’s work revolved around building OpenVR support into a working Genesis emulator, which included, among other things, some serious assumptions about how Sega VR’s panels were positioned and shaped, and then fixing the quirks of 1994 to run more efficiently on modern computers (in part to reduce the potential motion sickness of a Genesis-era game locked at 15fps). The resulting emulator and a pair of compiled Nuclear rush ROMs are available for download and testing from the VGHF article.

Nuclear rush running on an emulator, as featured by Richard Whitehouse.

Ars Technica tested this emulator and ROM combination on a Windows 10 PC running an HP Reverb G2 headset, and I can confirm that the game plays about as well as you might expect: it’s a game of rudimentary 3D tank, as if the arcade classic of Atari Battlezone had been rebuilt using Genesis-era sprites and palettes, but that’s just sprite-field trickery, not the rudimentary polygon stuff of the early ’90s fare like Star Fox or Virtua Hunter. (Sega VR games were clearly not packed with extra cartridge chips like Sega’s SVP, used in the Genesis version of Virtua Racing.)

The resulting restored gameplay is by no means a revolutionary gaming experience. Still, the combined efforts of all of the people listed above have brought a game to life that the original version would probably have made you sick of. Fortunately, modern hardware (and its enterprising users) can revive canceled games in a way that won’t cause game history fans to throw their cookies away, a testament to the modern game preservation movement as a whole.

Discover the whole intriguing story, along with a ridiculous amount of technical information, at the Video Game History Foundation.

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