RETURN SMASH

How a filmmaker and his dream team of musicians and designers are resurrecting a cult Dreamcast classic for PSVR2

- SIMON PARKIN

Few people played Cosmic Smash, a futuristic, intergalactic sports game that arrived in 2001 during the twilight months of Sega’s tragi-glorious Dreamcast saga. But for those who did, the memories have lingered. You played as a translucent man, his crunching, stretching wireframe skeleton visible while you chased a molten-red rubber ball around a space-age court, racquet in hand. The rules were enviably succinct: squash meets Breakout. The far wall was constructed from Atari-issue blocks, which vanish on impact. Destroy all blocks before the timer runs out. Ten matches. Final boss (maybe). Welcome to Cosmic Smash.

Rez’s lithe, athletic cousin, Cosmic Smash launched a few weeks ahead of Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s trance masterpiece. Both games matched their laser-beam aesthetics with the sort of treble-heavy electronica that could pierce a cloud of cigarette smoke. Of the pair, Cosmic Smash was the more basic proposition, but it also showed a world bewitched by lavishly textured 3D games that gaming’s arcade heritage remained as urgent and legitimate as any high-production open world.

At the time, Jörg Tittel was a theatre student studying in New York, freelancing as a game journalist when he learned about Cosmic Smash via screenshots published in Famitsu DC, a Japanese magazine to which he occasionally contributed. He ordered a copy from Japan, the only territory in which Sega released the game (it had debuted in Japanese arcades a few months before the Dreamcast release). The disc arrived several weeks later, tucked snugly inside a semi-transparent milky DVD case that, when placed on a bookshelf, stood tall and awkward above the rest of the Japanese Dreamcast’s uniformly sized CD boxes.