VTOL

VTOL put the player of the Virtuality system into the cockpit of a combat aircraft capable of vertical takeoff and landing, offering an aerial action game over a three-dimensional battle landscape. Joystick controls allowed climbing, descending, and hovering in place while the player shot down enemy targets on the ground and in the air — making it one of the few early Virtuality titles built on aerial rather than ground-based action, offering a different kind of movement through space than the on-foot arenas like Dactyl Nightmare. The craft's ability to hover in place and rotate around its own axis gave the player the feeling of truly piloting an aircraft, not just following a predetermined track the way many aerial arcade games of the era did.

The visuals again relied on a simple polygonal engine without textures, this time spread across an open landscape with terrain and distant targets, which heightened the sense of height and flight for players inside the headset. Looking down at tiny targets and structures on the surface, combined with the ability to freely look around inside the cockpit, was among the moments players remembered most from a Virtuality arcade visit. The sound design focused on engine roar and explosions, with music staying in the background — the emphasis was on the feeling of controlling a craft in space, still a novelty in early-nineties arcades and one that drew in even players who already knew Virtuality's on-foot combat games.

VTOL expanded the second generation of the Virtuality system's lineup with an aerial genre, showing that the concept of location-based VR could be applied beyond on-foot combat. From today's perspective, it is a technically modest but conceptually interesting demonstration of how early virtual reality imagined cockpit flight, and the title is often cited as evidence that Virtuality's creators didn't want to stick to just one type of experience and sought ways to apply the same technology to different genres.

Why play it: For fans of aviation themes, VTOL is an interesting, technically modest demonstration of how early VR imagined cockpit flight, and evidence of Virtuality's effort to expand its lineup beyond on-foot combat.