SMASH
Game C-Smash VRS Developer Wolf & Wood Interactive Publisher RapidEyeMovers Format PSVR2 Release 2023
Few people played Cosmic Smash, a futuristic, intergalactic sports game that arrived in 2001 during the twilight months of Sega’s tragi-glorious Dreamcast saga. But for those who did, the memories have lingered. You played as a translucent man, his crunching, stretching wireframe skeleton visible while you chased a molten-red rubber ball around a space-age court, racquet in hand. The rules were enviably succinct: squash meets Breakout. The far wall was constructed from Atari-issue blocks, which vanish on impact. Destroy all blocks before the timer runs out. Ten matches. Final boss (maybe). Welcome to Cosmic Smash.
Rez’s lithe, athletic cousin, Cosmic Smash launched a few weeks ahead of Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s trance masterpiece. Both games matched their laser-beam aesthetics with the sort of treble-heavy electronica that could pierce a cloud of cigarette smoke. Of the pair, Cosmic Smash was the more basic proposition, but it also showed a world bewitched by lavishly textured 3D games that gaming’s arcade heritage remained as urgent and legitimate as any high-production open world.
At the time, Jörg Tittel was a theatre student studying in New York, freelancing as a game journalist when he learned about Cosmic Smash via screenshots published in Famitsu DC, a Japanese magazine to which he occasionally contributed. He ordered a copy from Japan, the only territor y in which Sega released the game (it had debuted in Japanese arcades a few months before the Dreamcast release). The disc arrived several weeks later, tucked snugly inside a semi-transparent milky DVD case that, when placed on a bookshelf, stood tall and awkward above the rest of the Japanese Dreamcast’s uniformly sized CD boxes.
“I just loved it,” he recalls. “The design was stunning – ever ything about it.” Something, however, was missing. Tittel claims that at the time he thought seemed perfectly suited to virtual reality, the technology Sega helped pioneer in the early ’90s, then swiftly discarded due to cost and technical challenges. “This is the tragedy and the genius of Sega,” he says. “They’ve always been just a little bit too ahead of their time, right? Always just overshooting a little bit.” To Tittel, the Dreamcast version of seemed to be a teaser for a fuller-bodied, more immersive experience – one perhaps found in an alternate timeline where ever yone in the world owned a Sega-brand VR
