If you're in your 20s or older, chances are you had a run-in with a virtual reality machine at least once back in the '90s. My local mall had an entire store that sold nothing but holograms and Magic Eye posters, so adding a VR machine was the natural progression if they wanted to remain on top of the futuristic crap market. The units were placed right at the front of the store where nobody could miss them, and sure enough, there was always a crowd gathered around to watch someone plunk down five bucks for a few minutes of confused stumbling about in Dactyl Nightmare. In fact, that's one of the reasons I never gave it a shot. I'd never be able to stand everyone watching me.

Virtual reality was really exciting to everyone for a year or two until people started to realize that it wasn't very good. It was a slow, clunky, notably lo-fi experience, and once you got over the initial amazement about walking around in a sparse virtual world constructed of basic geometric shapes, you remembered that you have no desire to visit a sparse world of basic geometric shapes, virtual or not. It wasn't all blue skies on the other end of the business, either: After the initial novelty rush, stores were left with bulky, expensive machinery that took up a good portion of their floor space and required extremely costly specialized maintenance. In the end, all parties decided at once that this wasn't such a good idea, and VR machines quietly disappeared from the world. Sure, there were some left in a few huge arcades and in military training, but that's not exactly the worldwide phenomenon VR was supposed to be.

The following article was taken from the October 1993 issue of Game Players, when the virtual world was still new and unexplored, and everything seemed possible. Well, except for The Lawnmower Man game being worth playing. I don't know if we were ever that gullible.