I have argued before that a headset is the best horror machine ever built, but I meant the games. This list is about the hardware, which has spent decades doing deeply unsettling things to the people wearing it and to anyone standing nearby, and almost never on purpose. It is Halloween. I ranked them, mildest first.
First, a word for the founding father. Ivan Sutherland’s 1968 head-mounted display tracked your head with “a mechanical arm hanging from the ceiling,” which his own paper calls “rather heavy and uncomfortable to use.” History named the thing the Sword of Damocles. His paper never does. So the first comfort complaint in VR was filed by the man who built it, and we have been filing them ever since.
8. The wipe-down schedule on a 1990s VR pod
The pods everybody remembers came from W Industries of Leicester, later Virtuality. I cannot swear mine was one of theirs. If it was, that helmet weighed more than six pounds, and the proof comes with a wonderful line from Computer Business Review in 1994, announcing a lighter model: “Strong neck muscles are no longer a pre-requisite.”
In 1993, Popular Science found four of these machines in a cordoned-off corner of a sports bar at the Mall of America. Players paid $5 for five minutes of Dactyl Nightmare, in which a pterodactyl “will grab you in its teeth, carry you into the sky, and then hurl you to your death.” The writer’s review of the hardware: “My head felt like it was trapped inside a pressure cooker.”
Neither of those is the creepy part. The creepy part is the 1000CS service manual, which tells arcade staff that “Hourly inspections should be carried out by the operator on the Visette Pads and Lenses,” and that “Pads should be cleaned using moist medicated wipes ensuring you cover all areas in contact with the head and face.” Hourly. At five minutes a go, that is twelve foreheads between inspections, in a sports bar, at a mall.
7. A mask that promised to smell like zombies
Feelreal raised $140,794 from 561 backers on Kickstarter in 2019, on a $20,000 goal, for a VR mask with scents built in. It promised “over 255 unique aromas,” along with a line I have thought about more than any healthy person should: “smell the gunpowder and earthy scent of rotting flesh as you fight off hordes of zombies.” PCGamesN listed a Skyrim set ending in “dragon, mountains, and cookie,” plus coming attractions that included Baby hair and, a little further down the same list, Zombie.
Then came the December 2019 update, with a sentence that deserves a plaque: “Since Feelreal Mask is technically a vaping device, we had to start a new round of testing and improving the product to get a permission for mass production and sales.” Later updates moved on to regulators, then the pandemic, then staff leaving, and the final one, dated November 6, 2020, is the best closing line in this entire genre: “We’re here to remind you that the project is still on hold, but still alive.”
That was six years ago next week. I could not confirm that a single backer ever got a mask.
Still alive, though.
6. The Virtual Boy instruction booklet
Enough has been said about the Virtual Boy’s red screen. Read the paperwork instead. Nintendo’s 1995 tabletop headset cost $179.95, and its game manuals open like a threat: “This product MUST NOT be used by children under the age of seven (7) years. Artificial stereo vision displays may not be safe for such children and may cause serious, permanent damage to their vision.”
The system instruction booklet then gets personal. It tells you to “Press your face firmly against the eyeshade.” It recommends an automatic pause that stops the game after about 30 minutes so you can “give your eyes some rest.” It asks you to “listen to the signals your body is giving you,” which is the sort of thing a stranger says to you in a dream. And in capitals, on a page about batteries: “FAILURE TO FOLLOW THE FOLLOWING INSTRUCTIONS MAY CAUSE THE BATTERIES TO MAKE ‘POPPING’ SOUNDS AND LEAK BATTERY ACID RESULTING IN PERSONAL INJURY AND DAMAGE TO YOUR VIRTUAL BOY OR ACCESSORY.”
Nintendo brought the Virtual Boy back this year for Switch, and the leaflet for the cardboard model includes this: “Do not press sharp cardboard points or sides against the skin.” Thirty-one years, and the threat level has dropped from your retinas to a paper cut.
5. Sega VR, the headset that was too realistic
The great legend. Sega showed a VR headset for the Genesis at Summer CES in Chicago in 1993, and Sega Visions promised it “in time for Christmas this year” for less than $200. Popular Science quoted the company’s pitch of “a completely realistic 360-degree game world.” It never shipped, and the reason every VR fan can recite is that Sega killed it for being too realistic, because kids might forget where they were and hurt themselves. It is the greatest excuse in the history of consumer electronics, and I have repeated it at parties.
So I went looking for Sega actually saying it, and I could not find it anywhere. The earliest version I can locate that calls it an official Sega line is a 2004 Sega-16 article, a decade after the fact, with no source attached. What the man running Sega of America told Electronic Gaming Monthly in December 1994 was far less fun. Tom Kalinske said the units in Japan’s theme parks cost about $5,000 and “The unit shown at CES just didn’t deliver the VR experience.” Two decades later he told a podcast, “One of the problems was almost everybody got sick.”
