C-Smash VRS – a VR remake of a Sega Obscurity – celebrates like it was 2001

Jörg Tittel is an interesting guy. Born in Belgium, he studied in New York and has an indefinable mid-Atlantic accent with American and German overtones. He has written, directed, produced, and worked on everything from Activision to video games, stage plays, films, and graphic novels minority report licensed game based on a West End stage adaptation of Ernest Hemingway The sun also rises. Just in the context of that eclectic resume, his latest project comes as no surprise: a VR reboot of a forgotten futuristic tennis game for Sega Dreamcast.

Cosmic Strikereleased in 2001, was originally a Sega arcade game that combined tennis – or more specifically, squash – with the classic arcade game Breaking out. The player controls a wireframe athlete and knocks out blocks at the far end of a cuboid space by hitting a ball at them. A contemporary of Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s classic recanother Sega production, Cosmic Strike has a similar vibe: cool graphic design, Tron-Style neon minimalism and a utopian, futuristic vision of life in the machine. How rec, its sad fate would only find its way onto the Dreamcast after Sega had discontinued the console and retired from the hardware business. not how recit also didn’t get a PlayStation 2 version to save it from obscurity. Cosmic Strike was a cool game, but few people have given it much thought since then.

However, title has; this is a man who acc his IMDb bio, helped fund his college education by writing for the official Dreamcast magazine. In founding his new venture, RapidEyeMovers, a boutique game production and publishing label, Tittel fought Sega for the right to license this almost-forgotten game. “Half” of the people he spoke to at the Japanese publisher didn’t even know what he was talking about, he tells me. But he persevered and eventually won her approval before signing English VR specialist developer Wolf & Wood to help realize his revival dream Cosmic Strike come true.

The result is C-Smash VRS, a PlayStation VR 2 exclusive (for now). I had a chance to try it out at a recent press demo in London, which took place in a pristine white venue blaring techno music. Tittel, who wore branded jumpsuits that made him look like a lanky, futuristic crime scene technician, wandered around sipping beers and meeting with journalists and PRs. It wasn’t just the game itself that felt like a trip back in time to the early 2000s. They don’t make games like this anymore and they don’t do PR campaigns like this anymore.

C-Smash VRS keeps Cosmic Strike‘s minimalist teal and orange design and the abstract avatars that expand the look a bit to make it more open to sci-fi; You can peek out the windows in your digital squash court to see star fields and curved planetary surfaces. In single player, the goal of the game remains the same; Hit the ball with your bat to knock out blocks across the room. But the experience is quite different, not so much because of the VR perspective as because of the motion controls.

With the PlayStation VR 2 Sense controllers, you serve by pulling an airborne ball towards you with your left hand and then hitting it with your right (or vice versa for lefties). If the conditions are right, you can also hold the trigger with your racquet hand to suck the ball towards your racquet and unleash a targeted power smash. You also have to use the joystick to move your character left and right along the baseline, much like a bat in it Breaking out or pong. (An optional iris thoughtfully darkens your peripheral vision during motion to reduce motion sickness.)

This combination of analogue and digital control takes some getting used to; maybe it’s just that I haven’t played a VR game in a long time, but I’ve had to physically train myself out of lunging for the ball. It’s fair to say that Wolf & Wood needs some tweaking. Serves feel sticky and I found it difficult to pull the ball to my forehand rather than my backhand, resulting in some pretty tepid serves.

I initially struggled with the rather long series of tutorial levels, but eventually got my money’s worth. When it clicks and a rally starts and the blocks keep disappearing, it’s very satisfying. (Tittel promises a full campaign mode that can even be followed by a story, as well as co-op play.) Even better was the one-on-one versus mode, a sort of tennis variant where you have to knock out the blocks behind your opponent, while defending your own. This had a strong just-one-more-go factor that was reminiscent of Wii sports at its best; I stopped because I was sweating quite a bit in the headset, not because I wasn’t having fun.

Tittel had proudly purchased an original Cosmic Strike Arcade cabinet to place in the corner of the event room. Playing it for a minute, I was immediately struck by the game’s crisp controls, smooth speed, and mind-blowing wish-granting – none of that could really be said of my fumbling efforts in VR gaming. But the arcade game didn’t make me grin in the same post-workout way, either.

However, one question remained. Why is this even happening? Nobody asked for it Cosmic Strike to come back, and certainly nobody in VR asked for it. C-Smash VRS seems like a niche within a niche, and yet Tittel really spends money on it – on this press event, on the graphic design, on hiring figures like Ken Ishii (infinite rec) and Danalogue (of London jazz-funk band The Comet Is Coming) to make the music, via a collaboration with Ukrainian fashion house MDNT45 (hence the jumpsuit), and a promised lavish physical expense.

Tittel’s belief in the enduring power of Cosmic Strike is unshakable. He recalls getting the Dreamcast version in its customized packaging – a translucent DVD case with an orange disc inside – and thinking, “Sure, maybe it’s all dead, but this thing will stay… It was iconic from the start. It refuses to die. […] It felt really good Tron. It felt positive Tronwhere you’re not trapped against your will, but in a comfortable, graphically reduced reality, and that’s what I wanted to live in.”

Tittel doesn’t seem to care about the potential audience Cosmic Strike and VR are small, not to mention their overlap. For him, the integrity of the game itself is everything. “I wanted to release the game because […] I wanted to put the marketing and ad narrative in there because I don’t really like marketing. I don’t like PR very much. It’s so boring, it feels disingenuous. So when I make it a part of the art, everything becomes fully integrated. […] For me it’s theatre, for me it’s a performance. I want to do things with purpose, to be original and to strip things down to their essence.”

Tittel professes hating licensed products and marketing, and yet he’s made these things his mission because he wants games as works of art to be holistic wholes in which every extension of the brand resonates. Is he an artist in salesman’s clothes or vice versa? Honestly, I enjoyed talking to him, but I’m not sure. If you are one of the backers of RapidEyeMovers, that might be a bit worrying. But you can’t fault Tittel’s dedication to bringing back a 2001 gaming vibe we all thought was lost forever.

A demo for C-Smash VRS Coming to PlayStation VR 2 on March 23rd.