Dactyl Nightmare
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| Dactyl Nightmare | |
|---|---|
| Information | |
| VR/AR | Virtual Reality |
| Developer | W Industries (Virtuality) |
| Platform | Virtuality 1000CS arcade system |
| Device | Virtuality Visette 1 |
| Type | Game |
| Genre | Shooter |
| Input Device | Space Joystick |
| Play Area | Standing |
| Game Mode | Multiplayer |
| Release Date | 1991 |
Dactyl Nightmare is a multiplayer virtual reality arcade shooter developed by W Industries, the Leicester company later known as Virtuality, for the stand-up Virtuality 1000CS pods of the early 1990s. Players stand inside a pod, wear a head-mounted display and hunt each other with a handheld gun across a small arena of floating platforms while a pterodactyl circles overhead and swoops down to lift unwary players into the air.[1][2]
Games-X reported two "Nightmare" units at Virtuality's London launch in August 1991,[3] and the game reached the United States through Horizon Entertainment, Virtuality's exclusive U.S. distributor, by May 1992.[4] Time Extension called it "one of the best-loved VR games of the era".[2]
Gameplay
Dactyl Nightmare is a first-person shooter in which players in networked pods hunt each other. Time Extension calls it a four-player game, while Games-X described two-player matches at the 1991 London launch.[2][3] Each player stands inside a Virtuality 1000CS pod, wears the Visette headset and holds a gun-shaped "Space Joystick" connected to a belt worn around the waist.[2][1] Turning the head changes the view, and the player sees the gun barrel move on screen as the joystick is aimed.[3] Jonathan Waldern, the founder of W Industries, called it "a chase and kill game" at its London launch in 1991.[3]
The arena is small. Kotaku's Lewis Packwood described it in 2016 as "a small arena consisting of five floating platforms", and Computer Graphics World described a "surreal checkerboard world".[1][5] The Virtuality.com website describes a "multiplayer map with several levels and platforms" with grenade launcher weapons.[6] In Packwood's account, the gun fires in an arc and can be fired only once every two seconds, which makes shooting tricky; a hit player explodes, and the pterodactyl can lift a player into the air and drop them from a height.[1] A player can also stumble off the edge of a platform and drop into a dark void.[7] A game lasts a few minutes; Packwood's session in 2016 lasted two and a half minutes, against a computer-controlled opponent.[1]
Development
W Industries was founded in October 1987 by Jonathan Waldern with software specialist Al Humrich, mathematician Terry Rowley and engineer Richard Holmes, and was based in Leicester. According to Holmes, Waldern designed the computer architecture, Humrich wrote the software, Rowley supplied the algorithms for real-time 3D worlds, and Holmes designed the headsets and pods.[2][8]
The team built a sit-down pod first, tracked with a low-cost DC magnetic system from Ascension Technology. Because a stand-up unit needed the handheld Space Joystick to be tracked separately from the headset, which the Ascension system could not do, W Industries used the more expensive AC magnetic tracking from Polhemus for the stand-up pods.[2] In the stand-up machine, a transmitter in the ring around the player creates a magnetic field, and receivers in the Visette and the gun controller report where the player is looking and pointing.[1] The machine is built around an Amiga 3000 computer, runs at 20 frames per second, and the headset weighs about 3.5 kilograms.[1]
An in-development version of the stand-up unit was first shown to the public at a computer graphics exhibition at Alexandra Palace in London in November 1990.[2] Holmes recalled that the team worked out how to network the stand-up pods only a few days before Virtuality's demonstration at the IAAPA Expo in Florida, a show that Time Extension says "marked the debut of the four-player shooting game Dactyl Nightmare". Holmes said that "The Americans took to this like you wouldn't believe."[2]
Release
Games-X reported Virtuality's London launch in its issue of 22-28 August 1991: two "Nightmare" units had been installed at the Rock Garden Café in Covent Garden, where two players tried to eliminate each other in a maze-like world, while another Virtuality unit at the Trocadero in Piccadilly ran an aircraft simulation. Waldern told the magazine that the "Nightmare" systems were interchangeable so that they could run other games as the company released them.[3] Virtuality Group also brought the game to an exhibition at the Southgate complex in Melbourne, Australia, in 1991, where a few minutes of play cost $5.[7]
In the United States, the game was handled by Horizon Entertainment, a division of Edison Brothers Stores and the exclusive U.S. distributor of the Virtuality system. In May 1992, Play Meter reported that the first U.S. entertainment center devoted entirely to Virtuality had opened in St. Louis Union Station with four networked stand-up and four networked sit-down units, and that players could choose between Dactyl Nightmare, "a chase game on space platforms", and ExoRex.[4] Computer Graphics World later listed Dactyl Nightmare under May 1992 as a game from Horizon Entertainment designed to run on Virtuality stations.[5]
Virtuality machines were expensive for arcade operators. Kotaku reported that a stand-up pod cost around 30,000 pounds to manufacture, that the games cost between 5,000 and 10,000 pounds, and that a play cost up to around 4 pounds in the early 1990s, partly because each machine needed an attendant.[1]
| Hardware | Region | Date | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Virtuality 1000CS (stand-up) | United Kingdom | August 1991 | London launch reported by Games-X under the name "Nightmare"[3] |
| Virtuality 1000CS (stand-up) | Australia | 1991 | Virtuality exhibition at Southgate, Melbourne[7] |
| Virtuality 1000CS (stand-up) | United States | By May 1992 | Distributed by Horizon Entertainment; St. Louis Union Station center[4] |
Later versions
Virtuality.com lists Dactyl Nightmare 2 - Race For The Eggs! among the games for the 486 PC based Virtuality 2000 series.[6] Arcadian Virtual Reality, which later sold and supported Virtuality hardware, listed both "Dactyl Nightmare SP" and "Dactyl Race for the Eggs" as stand-up games for the SU 2000.[9] These are separate releases for different hardware and are not covered in detail here.
Reception
Few contemporary reviews of the game itself have been found. Games-X's 1991 launch report called the "extra realism and effect" of Virtuality "astounding", while remarking on the higher price of a play.[3] Later accounts are mixed. Matt Wilkinson, who joined Virtuality after working at Rare, told Eurogamer that he was given a go on Dactyl Nightmare when he called at the company's headquarters with his CV: "The game itself was terrible, but the experience of putting on a headset and being immersed in a world was incredible."[8] Writing for The Wheeler Centre in 2016, Clem Bastow, who played it in Melbourne as a child, wrote that the game was not "necessarily bad", but that "the headset was confusing, the immersive experience was completely overwhelming".[7] After playing a restored machine in 2016, Packwood wrote that his expectations had been low but "the tracking was spot on".[1]
The Virtual Reality Society called Dactyl Nightmare Virtuality's biggest success and wrote that it "may well have been the first deathmatch first person shooter ever, pre-dating Doom by two years".[10]
Legacy and preservation
Virtuality was declared insolvent in 1997 and its assets were sold to Cybermind Interactive Europe. The arcade business was sold to Arcadian VR in 2004 and again in 2012 to VirtuosityTech.[8] In 2020, Road to VR reported that VirtuosityTech, which it described as the current IP holder of the SU 2000 and SU 3000 games, intended to port its library of early VR games to modern headsets, with no release date. The list of candidate titles included Dactyl Nightmare 2 but not the original game.[11]
Working 1000 series machines are rare. In 2016, Kotaku reported that collector Simon Marston had restored two stand-up Virtuality 1000 machines, one of them owned by the Retro Computer Museum, and that he believed they were the only working examples; Packwood played Dactyl Nightmare on one at the Virtuality booth at Play Expo Blackpool.[1] By 2024 the museum, in Leicester, had four working Virtuality 1000 series units, two stand-up and two sit-down, linked for two-player play and maintained by Marston as a volunteer.[8]
Fans have made unofficial recreations for modern headsets. NeoTeo reported that an independent developer named Breton built a free single-player recreation for the Oculus Rift after watching a YouTube video of the original, with support for the Razer Hydra; in it the pterodactyl comes for the player after eight shots have been fired (see Dactyl "Nightmare" 2.0 - Old School VR).[12] Road to VR noted an unofficial version marketed as Polygon Nightmare for the Rift.[11] NeoTeo's download link for Breton's recreation points to the same store listing.[12] The Meta Horizon Store listing describes it as a "Tribute to 'Dactyl Nightmare' for the Virtuality Arcade platform 1991", as a single-player game against a computer-controlled opponent, and credits the Dactyl Nightmare copyright to VirtuosityTech, Inc.[13]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 Lewis Packwood (2016-05-27). "The Man Who's Keeping 1990s Virtual Reality Machines Alive". Kotaku. https://kotaku.com/the-man-whos-keeping-1990s-virtual-reality-machines-ali-1778990894. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 Lewis Packwood (2023-12-07). "The Making Of: Virtuality, The 1990s Pioneer That Sold The World On VR". Time Extension. https://www.timeextension.com/features/the-making-of-virtuality-the-1990s-pioneer-that-sold-the-world-on-vr. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 "Virtuality launch". Games-X, issue 18 (22-28 August 1991), p. 2. Internet Archive. 1991-08-22. https://archive.org/stream/games-x-uk/GamesX_UK_18_djvu.txt. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 "Play Meter, May 1992, p. 30 (News)". Play Meter, vol. 18, no. 6. International Arcade Museum Library. 1992-05. https://elibrary.arcade-museum.com/Play-Meter/1992-May/30. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Karen Moltenbrey, Jenny Donelan (2002-03). "Gaming Retrospective: 25th Anniversary, Part 3". Computer Graphics World, vol. 25, no. 3. https://www.cgw.com/Publications/CGW/2002/Volume-25-Issue-3-March-2002-/GAMING-RETROSPECTIVE-25-sup-th-sup-Anniversary-P.aspx. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 "Home - Virtuality.com". Virtuality.com. https://virtuality.com/. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 Clem Bastow (2016-08-01). "Real Talk: How bad was nineties VR?". The Wheeler Centre. https://www.wheelercentre.com/news-stories/2016/read-real-talk-how-bad-was-nineties-vr/. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 Damien McFerran (2024-04-30). "Virtuality Gave Us '90s VR - Now Its Legacy Is Being Celebrated In Its Home City Of Leicester". Time Extension. https://www.timeextension.com/features/virtuality-gave-us-90s-vr-now-its-legacy-is-being-celebrated-in-its-home-city-of-leicester. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
- ↑ "2000 Series SU (Stand Up) Option List". Arcadian Virtual Reality, L.L.C.. https://web.archive.org/web/20231106150952/http://www.arcadianvr.com/SU_2000_OPTIONS.htm. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
- ↑ "Virtuality - A New Reality of Promise, Two Decades Too Soon". Virtual Reality Society. https://www.vrs.org.uk/dr-jonathan-walden-virtuality-new-reality-promise-two-decades-soon/. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 Scott Hayden (2020-08-18). "Official Virtuality '90s Game Ports Could Be Landing on Modern VR Headsets Soon". Road to VR. https://www.roadtovr.com/dactyl-nightmare-2-virtuality-port/. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
- ↑ 12.0 12.1 Matias Benítez (2020-07-04). "Dactyl Nightmare: Juego de realidad virtual de 1991". NeoTeo. https://www.neoteo.com/dactyl-nightmare-juego-de-realidad-virtual-de-1991. Retrieved 2026-10-11.
- ↑ "Polygon Nightmare". Meta Horizon Store. Meta Platforms. https://www.meta.com/experiences/pcvr/polygon-nightmare/1333056616777885/. Retrieved 2026-10-11.