Buggy Ball

Buggy Ball combined driving small buggies with the principle of a sports game resembling football or hockey, where the goal was to use a buggy to push a large ball into the opponent's goal. The player sat behind the wheel of a buggy rendered in an arena space, maneuvered around the field, and tried to get the ball where it needed to go, which made the game one of the few sport-vehicle titles in the Virtuality lineup and set it apart from the predominantly on-foot action titles. The fight for the ball between the buggies also naturally led to collisions and jostling, which added another dimension to matches besides pure scoring and brought the game closer to contact sports than classic racing.

Technically, this was again a simple, textureless polygonal environment, this time bounded as an enclosed field with goals and a large ball in the middle, which, thanks to the cockpit view from the buggy, was easy to read even with the limited resolution of the helmets of the time. The clearly defined, enclosed playing field helped players quickly grasp the rules even without lengthy onboarding, which was an advantage for Virtuality titles, since a typical arcade visit lasted only a few minutes and no one wanted to spend a long time studying instructions. The sound design focused on the buggy's engine and ball impacts; music was again only supplementary, with the main attention directed at the dynamics of the game itself and the rivalry between players.

Buggy Ball expanded the second generation of Virtuality's sports offerings with a collective, at-a-glance easier-to-grasp concept, making it a suitable choice even for less experienced arcade visitors. In its historical context, it is now seen as an interesting example of an attempt to link VR with a traditional sports game concept as early as the beginning of the 1990s, long before similar attempts on modern headsets, and it is a reminder that the idea of virtual sport is nothing new in recent years.

Why play it: Anyone looking for proof that the idea of virtual sport is nothing new in recent years will find in Buggy Ball an interesting attempt to link VR with a collective sports concept as early as the start of the 1990s.