Exorex

Exorex was a fighting game on the Virtuality system in which two players faced off in an arena as robots or armored figures equipped with various weapons and abilities. Unlike on-foot shooters like Dactyl Nightmare, this was a focused one-on-one duel where timing attacks, defense, and use of the arena's space were key, bringing the game close to the fighting titles of the time, just translated into an immersive first-person environment. The player thus didn't watch their character from a distance as in classic fighting games, but experienced the duel directly from the perspective of the fighting machine itself, a fundamentally different way of presenting the same genre compared to the arcade cabinets of the era, forcing the player to gauge distance to their opponent and timing far more intuitively than in flat-screen fighting games.

The technical execution again relied on simple, untextured polygonal models, this time emphasizing the robotic or armored figures of the opponents, which could be observed up close thanks to movement within the arena's space. Thanks to spatial tracking of the player, the system could recognize not just button presses but also, to some extent, how the player moved and turned on the platform, enriching the duel with a physical dimension compared to flat fighting cabinets. The sound design accompanied the duels with collision and gunshot effects, with music staying in the background — the main emphasis was on the feeling of a real opponent standing directly opposite the player in another headset of the same machine.

Exorex represented the Virtuality system's attempt to also offer the genre of direct combat duels, popular in arcades of the time, thereby expanding the palette of experiences offered by the second generation of machines. Today it is remembered as a lesser-known but interesting piece of evidence for how early VR tried to adapt popular arcade genres to its new spatial medium and its technical limitations, even in a genre that connects less naturally to virtual reality than pure shooters.

Why play it: Anyone seeking a curiosity from VR history will appreciate Exorex as evidence of Virtuality's effort to bring even the combat duel into a spatial medium, even though duels connect less naturally to virtual reality than shooters.