How a filmmaker and his dream team of musicians and designers are resurrecting a cult Dreamcast classic for PSVR2

By Simon Parkin

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 Cosmic Smash 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 Cosmic Smash 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 headset

Tittel graduated and, after a brief stint working as a writer for Treyarch, moved into a career in film and theatre. Witnessing the explosion of indie games in the late 2000s, he was reminded of the spirit of the Cosmic Smash era. “The Dreamcast was to me the birthplace of the indie scene,” he says. “You had developers working within Sega, but who were also incredibly independent, actively encouraged by the leadership at Sega to make the games they wanted. They didn’t necessarily have the marketing money to back them, so the concept, the passion, the artistr y had to shine, much like with indie games today.” Then, with the arrival of affordable VR headsets, Tittel remembered Cosmic Smash. He began to wonder whether it might be possible to persuade Sega to bring the game to virtual reality, the realm in which he believed its truest form had always belonged. Securing the rights – even to an obscure game for a dead console – from a company notoriously protective of its IP was going to be a difficult trick shot to pull off.