Sega VR
From Sega Retro
To do
- Talk about Virtua Racing rumors.
- Jurassic Park VR?
- What on earth is Megaplane?
CartridgeCulture (talk) 05:06, 11 January 2024 (EST)
Interview
interesting comments from Régis Monterrin (author of this book) here - apparently Shinobu Toyoda said Sega VR cost SOA $6mil, was cancelled because they didn't think the public were ready, when Hayao Nakayama realised this he got very angry (as was his wont), etc
Ted618 (talk) 12:05, 1 November 2022 (GMT)
Did SoJ/Nakayama issue a VR mandate?
HMM Hm Hm... left field thought but. what if SoJ/Nakayama stood up and clapped “It’s VR time!” and issued a directive to both SoJ & SoA to start looking into VR stuff. SoJ ended up with the MVD, and SoA ended up with the unreleased Sega VR? Would explain why both companies starting doing their own VR development at around the same time. Maybe there were plans to go with whatever system worked the best, but then VR being what it is caused the MVD’s planned implimentation to get significantly scaled back? I don’t know, just thoughts. CartridgeCulture (talk) 21:03, 27 April 2021 (EDT)
- from what i can tell, the Sega VR project headed by SoA was likely much further into development than whatever SoJ's initial efforts were in 1993, which may have not even existed/were otherwise kept tightly under wraps. SoA's got publicity as early as 93, the MVD first went public in early 94 AFAIK, and nothing is known about what SoJ were doing before Virtuality came along
- have this pointer: while looking through old 1993 issues of Game Machine, i noticed a story ran in one issue about SoJ and Virtuality reaching their first agreement to collaborate, at that time apparently only on the Net Merc thing - it had a notable pic attached of Nakayama w/ one of the Virtuality guys. also mentioned something along the lines about how it was not yet decided whether the game would use Sega's headset or one of Virtuality's, so who knows if they meant SoA's SVR or some early SoJ design that we don't know about yet
- so basically, my current timeline is this
- 1992 - initial Sega VR development w/ IDEO almost certainly started here at SoA, SoJ may have been doing early stuff
- 1993 - SoA goes public with their attempt, SoJ keep quiet about theirs (if it ever existed in the first place) but reach agreements ::with Virtuality to create Net Merc, which soon evolve into the creation of VR-1 and the MVD alongside it
- 1994 - MVD revealed, VR-1 released at Joypolis, Sega VR already dead in the water
- 1995 - Net Merc cancelled, as well as the MVD version of Virtual-On if the rumours are true, all serious VR activity probably over at Sega by end of year
- i suspect/hope there's more on this matter that can be found in Game Machine that i just haven't caught up to yet, there's so many blanks that need to be filled in here lol
- (and it wouldn't surprise me if nakayama was the one who threw down a diktat for VR, but without any quotes implying or confirming so i'm afraid it's pure conjecture)
- Thank you for all this, this is super useful and I appreciate you going out of your way to outline it like this. I agree, so many blanks. In regard to Sega VR, in particular I wish we knew more of the project’s staff. CartridgeCulture (talk) 03:24, 2 May 2021 (EDT)