How Video Game Historians Resurrected Sega's Lost VR Headset

Like digital-age necromancers, Video Game History Foundation director Frank Cifaldi and head of digital conservation Rich Whitehouse resurrected Sega VR, emulating it along with the Sega VR game Nuclear Rush on a modern Vive VR headset. According to the Video Game History Foundation, the tech could be manufactured for one dollar, which allowed Sega to hit its price target of $200—ten dollars more than the Sega Genesis console it ran off.Sega trotted its VR helmet around at trade shows and garnished it with marketing materials. The Video Game History Foundation has a special interest in preserving video game source code, which Cifaldi describes as “one of the most volatile and important things to be documenting.”The Sega VR project is different, though. Earlier this year, one of the developers for a Sega VR title, a hovercraft game called Nuclear Rush, ripped the game’s source code off an old CD-ROM. “We kind of had to scrape things together.”In this case, the Nuclear Rush source code contained hints at how the game was intended to interact with the Sega VR. It’s trickery.”In a blog post documenting the technical details of the project, Whitehouse has shared an emulator for the Sega Genesis with Sega VR support and the source code for Nuclear Rush.