History of VR Games: From Sensorama to Quest and Half-Life: Alyx
From the 1960s Sensorama and Sword of Damocles to Virtuality arcades, the Virtual Boy, Oculus Rift's Kickstarter, the Quest, and Half-Life: Alyx.
Put on a headset and another world unfolds before your eyes; turn your head and that world turns with you. Virtual reality (VR) games let you experience from "inside" the screen games you used to watch from "outside" it. Today you can enjoy VR games at home with wireless, standalone headsets, but getting here took nearly 60 years.
In this post, we walk through the history of VR games in order: from VR's early experiments to the first boom and bust of the 1990s, the new era opened by the Oculus Rift in the 2010s, and the arrival of standalone headsets and "killer apps."
The 1960s: Machines That Fool the Senses
The roots of VR are older than computer games themselves. American filmmaker Morton Heilig dreamed in the 1950s of an "experience theater" that would engage all of the audience's senses, and in 1962 he built a machine called the Sensorama. Users sat in a motorcycle-shaped seat and watched stereoscopic color footage of riding through the streets of New York, complete with wind from fans, sound, and seat vibration, plus the smell of exhaust when passing a bus and the smell of pizza in front of a pizzeria. However, it only played fixed footage and didn't respond to the user's actions.
In 1968, computer scientist Ivan Sutherland and his students built a head-mounted display (HMD). The device was so heavy it had to be suspended from the ceiling, earning it the nickname "the Sword of Damocles." Displaying simple computer-generated 3D shapes that moved with the user's head, it's considered one of the first augmented and virtual reality displays.
In the late 1980s, VPL Research, founded by former Atari employee Jaron Lanier and others, popularized the term "virtual reality." The company's DataGlove, which read finger movements, led to the Power Glove, a 1989 peripheral for the Famicom (NES). About a million units were sold, but its imprecise controls meant it didn't last.
The 1990s: The First VR Boom
In the early 1990s, expectations were high that VR would soon become the future of gaming. The 1992 film The Lawnmower Man also imprinted the image of the VR headset on the public.
Virtuality in the Arcades
The first commercially successful VR game machines were in arcades. Britain's W Industries (renamed Virtuality Group in 1993) unveiled its Virtuality system at a London exhibition in 1990. The machine featured a stereoscopic headset, head position tracking, and multiplayer linking multiple units. It was the arcade industry's attempt to offer an experience home devices couldn't match, but high prices and maintenance costs made it hard to keep running for long.
Sega VR and VR-1
In the early 1990s, Sega developed the Sega VR headset for the Mega Drive (Genesis) and showed it at trade shows. However, development problems delayed its release, and it was eventually canceled. Instead, in 1994 Sega released VR-1, a VR attraction for theme parks, putting some of its head-tracking technology to use in entertainment venues.
The Failure of Nintendo's Virtual Boy
The most famous attempt, and failure, in the home market was Nintendo's Virtual Boy in 1995. Development was led by Gunpei Yokoi, creator of the Game Boy, and it was promoted as the first console to display stereoscopic 3D graphics.
But it had many problems.
- Monochrome red display: To cut costs, it used only red LEDs, so the screen was nothing but red and black.
- Awkward posture: Rather than being worn on the head, it sat on a stand and you had to press your face against it, making it an awkward device that was neither portable nor a home console.
- Health issues: Many people complained of headaches, dizziness, and eye strain.
Production of the Virtual Boy ended in 1996, with only 22 games released. It sold about 770,000 units, the fewest of any standalone Nintendo console.
Ultimately, 1990s VR failed because of technology. Computer graphics weren't powerful enough to render convincing 3D worlds quickly, and display lag and low resolution caused motion sickness. Through the 2000s, VR remained mainly a subject of experiments at universities and research labs.
2012: The Oculus Rift and Kickstarter
The person who revived VR was a young American named Palmer Luckey. In 2011, at the age of 18, he built a prototype VR headset with a wide field of view in his parents' garage in Long Beach, California. The spread of smartphones, which made cheap, high-performance displays and motion sensors available, was a big help.
One of the people who tried this prototype was John Carmack, the developer of Doom. Carmack judged it the most immersive HMD he'd ever used, and he demoed a game on an Oculus Rift prototype at E3 2012. On August 1 of the same year, Oculus launched a Kickstarter campaign, selling the developer kit (DK1) for $300.
The response was explosive. In 2014, Facebook (now Meta) acquired Oculus for $2 billion, and in March 2016 the first consumer product, the Oculus Rift CV1, came out. Sony's PlayStation VR and Valve and HTC's HTC Vive were released the same year, and 2016 came to be called something like year one of consumer VR. Valve also released its own headset, the Valve Index, in 2019.
| Year | Device | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1995 | Nintendo Virtual Boy | Monochrome red stereoscopic display, a commercial failure |
| 2013 | Oculus Rift DK1 | Developer kit that started on Kickstarter |
| 2014 | Google Cardboard | VR made from a cardboard box and a smartphone |
| 2016 | Oculus Rift CV1, HTC Vive, PlayStation VR | The real start of high-performance consumer VR |
| 2019 | Oculus Quest | A standalone six-degrees-of-freedom headset that works without a PC |
| 2020 | Oculus Quest 2 | Light and affordable, it drove mainstream adoption |
| 2023 | PlayStation VR2, Meta Quest 3 | High-resolution OLED (PS VR2), color mixed reality (Quest 3) |
| 2024 | Apple Vision Pro | A high-end headset billed as spatial computing |
Experiments in Cheap VR: From Cardboard to Labo
Apart from expensive headsets, cheap smartphone-based VR was also tried. In June 2014, Google unveiled Google Cardboard, made by folding cardboard, and in 2015 Samsung, together with Oculus, released the Gear VR for Galaxy smartphones (the Gear VR service ended in 2020). Nintendo also released the Nintendo Labo VR Kit in 2019 as part of its cardboard toy series. These devices lowered the barrier to trying VR for the first time, but they had limitations, such as being unable to track head position.
In Search of a Killer App: Beat Saber and Half-Life: Alyx
The hardware arrived, but VR didn't spread as quickly as expected. Through 2018, VR device sales fell short of 10 million units, and the lack of a "killer app" was cited as the biggest reason. There was no game compelling enough to make people buy the hardware.
The first hits came from small studios. Beat Saber, a rhythm game released in early access in May 2018, was a simple game of slicing incoming blocks with lightsabers to the music, but it was praised as the game that best made use of VR's strength of physical movement. It sold more than 4 million copies by February 2021, and its developer, Beat Games, was acquired by Oculus Studios in 2019. Superhot VR, in which time moves only when the player moves, is another notable success.
Then, in March 2020, Valve released Half-Life: Alyx, a mainline Half-Life game built from the ground up exclusively for VR. Picking up and throwing objects with your hands, and pulling distant objects toward you with glove-shaped tools called "gravity gloves," showed off interactions unique to VR. It also included several movement options to reduce motion sickness. Many outlets called Alyx VR's first "killer app," and Valve Index stock sold out within a week of the game's announcement.
The Era of Standalone Headsets
Another key to bringing VR to the mainstream was "cutting the cord." Early high-performance VR required an expensive gaming PC, cables, and sensors mounted in the corners of the room. The Oculus Quest, released in May 2019, worked on its own without a PC while still tracking the position of your head and body with cameras on the front of the headset.
The Oculus Quest 2, released in October 2020, became hugely popular by being lighter and cheaper. Qualcomm stated in November 2021 that at least 10 million Quest 2 units had shipped worldwide. When Facebook renamed itself Meta, the device name also became "Meta Quest," and in October 2023 the Meta Quest 3 came out with enhanced mixed reality features that blend the real and virtual using color cameras.
In February of the same year, Sony released the PlayStation VR2 for the PlayStation 5, and in 2024 Apple entered the VR and mixed reality market with the release of the Apple Vision Pro.
Challenges VR Games Still Face
VR games still have several problems to solve.
- Motion sickness: When the motion your eyes see differs from the motion your body feels, you get motion sick. Teleportation, effects that narrow your field of view, and game designs played in place have reduced it, but they haven't eliminated it entirely.
- Weight and comfort: Wearing a headset for a long time strains your neck and face. The race to make devices lighter continues.
- Space: Games that get you moving need a lot of space, and there's a risk of bumping into nearby objects.
- Content and market size: The user base is still smaller than for consoles and mobile, so few big-budget VR-exclusive games come out.
Summary
The history of VR games has been "the process of technology catching up to a dream." The Sensorama and the Sword of Damocles of the 1960s showed the idea, and the 1990s boom left the lesson that the technology wasn't ready yet. Cheap components made possible by smartphones and Oculus's challenge reopened the door, and Beat Saber, Half-Life: Alyx, and the standalone Quest brought VR into the home.
In VR, the experience of directly grabbing, turning, and fitting things together with your hands matters. That's why genres that use the sense of touch, such as physics puzzles and spatial puzzles, are considered especially well suited to VR.