DEV ACCESS - Serving up

Jörg Tittel, Ryan Bousfield, and Rob Davis reveal how C-Smash VRS is hitting it out of the park on PSVR2

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There’s some wind up to the story of how C-Smash VRS director Jörg Tittel took his shot. He begins: “I was a videogame journalist at the turn of the century… Jesus.” Time waits for no-one.

Leafing through an issue of Famitsu in 2001, he says, “I saw this picture of this game with a style that struck me incredibly. And I was like, ‘What is this?’ And it said, Cosmic Smash, and then it said Dreamcast, and [I’m like] ‘Dreamcast? But they just announced it’s discontinued,’ and I looked at the release date, and it was later in the fall – and I needed to have that game.”

Tittel describes Cosmic Smash as “Pong meets Breakout.” It appeared on arcade machines across Europe and Japan, but only the latter territory saw a console release. During our video call, one of those arcade cabinets is visible over Tittel’s shoulder; he argues that an arcade experience is not far removed from modern virtual reality. “[For example, Sega’s Outrun] was moving me about and the music [came] out of these surround speakers and [...] I felt like I was in a dream and I loved it so much. And it was a VR experience except you're sitting inside the headset."

MADE OF THIS

There were reasons to resurrect Cosmic Smash as a VR title besides arcade nostalgia.