Decades Before Oculus Rift, ‘Red Dwarf’ Showed Me the Possibilities of Virtual Reality

Head to any video gaming conference or expo in 2016 and you'll be overwhelmed with countless virtual reality experiences to slip inside of. The same could be said of last year, too, but back then there was a lot more going on behind closed doors than on show to the public. Now, as in right now, this minute, with PlayStation VR imminent and the Gear VR, Oculus and Vive already selling in their millions, virtual reality has never been bigger. It has never been more likely to happen, having overcome several aborted previous attempts: Nintendo's infamous Virtual Boy, aka the red-for-danger spew machine, is just one prominent bump in the road between Atari founding its own soon-to-fail VR lab in the early 1980s and gamers actually becoming Batman in the forthcoming Arkham VR.

Virtual reality, or rather the dream-cum-nightmare of it, crept into the mainstream media in the late 1980s and early 1990s in a few memorable ways – and it was in those years that I first became aware of the potential to disappear inside a machine for an alternative view of my surroundings. There was The Lawnmower Man of 1992, a pre-Bond Pierce Brosnan-starring sci-fi flick based on the Stephen King story of the same name. I didn't watch it at the time (and still haven't), but I saw the ads, and the primitive-now CGI blew my just-about-pre-teen mind. It looked wild enough on paper – imagining that all around me was something else entirely, both haunting and inspiring at once.

I bought my share of (Sega-focused, usually) gaming mags at the time, Sega Pro and Power being favourites, the latter occasionally coming with cover-mounted novellas based popular games, like Golden Axe or Road Rash (look them up, they're incredible). Inside these monthly bibles of all things button bashing were stories of Sega's own VR wonder to come, simply called Sega VR. The headset was meant to come out as a Mega Drive peripheral in 1993, later moved to 1994, before being canned completely because, the company claimed, it was "too realistic". Clearly the leap from 8 to 16 bits was simply too much, as Sega had commercially issued a pair of "crystal shutter technology" 3D glasses for the previous-gen Master System. (Fun fact: the inventor of said glasses was Mark Cerny, who would go on to be the lead architect of both the PlayStation Vita and PlayStation 4.)

A scene from the "Gunmen of the Apocalypse" episode of 'Red Dwarf', first broadcast on October the 21st, 1993

But it was a television show, not a movie nor an actual piece of gaming kit, that really connected the younger me with the prospect of virtual reality. And that show was the soon-to-return Red Dwarf, the then-BBC-broadcast, far-future-set sitcom created by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, starring Gordon Brittas, Corrie's Lloyd Mullaney, Barrington from Maid Marian's band of Merry Men, and (later) that bloke who used to lounge around on piles of junk in (the surely overdue a revival of its own, given Robot Wars' comeback) Scrapheap Challenge.

If you didn't get Red Dwarf back then, you're not about to begin understanding it now, so I'll bypass the wider plot running through its many episodes, spanning soon to be eleven series, and skip straight to the fact that I liked the show enough as a kid to wear a T-shirt with "In Space, No One Can Hear You Smeg" written on it, and out in public, too. (It was obviously a local market knock-off rather than official merchandise, and having to explain what it meant to a friend of my parents, on Hampshire's Twyford Down, was a mortifying moment of formative significance. That shirt's long gone now; likewise a massive chunk of Twyford Down, given the M3 today cuts through where we once walked.) Suffice to say that I loved it, and my friends did too. We would discuss episodes endlessly, and few more so than three which leant on another of our loves, video games, for narrative direction.

A scene from the "Better Than Life" episode of 'Red Dwarf', first broadcast on September the 13th, 1988

"Better Than Life" was broadcast first, in 1988 – though I saw it a couple of years later, at a mate's house (the same friend I bought my Master System from – thanks, Anthony), on VHS, given I'd have been eight when it aired. The titular Better Than Life is a full-immersion video game that the crew of the Red Dwarf (I suppose I should at least make it clear that the show is named after a spaceship that features in it, rather than a generic, low-luminosity star) receive in some three-million-years-late arriving mail. There's a whole lot of bad news packed in with it, too – not least of all an update from Earth: everyone's dead now, guys – so the on-board trio plugs into Better Than Life to cheer themselves up.

Cat – played by Barrington, otherwise known as Danny John-Jules, and once upon a time the voice of Gex – finds himself dating both a mermaid (fish head, human legs, obviously) and Marilyn Monroe, while the uptight Rimmer – Brittas/Chris Barrie/Lara Croft's butler Hillary – both plays out an admiral's life and gets together with his own (long since dead) crush. The game makes all of their most unlikely fantasies appear a reality – but Rimmer's imagination takes an irreversible turn for the exceedingly negative, and his dreamland becomes a hellscape of unpaid taxes and several moaning kids. Come the end of the episode, the crew remains trapped in the game – but everything's fixed by the beginning of the next week's another-tangent-entirely instalment.

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"Back To Reality" of March 1992 is regularly held up as one of the very best Red Dwarf episodes (see here, and here), and again finds the crew – now joined by the Series 4000 mechanoid Kryten – diving into virtual reality, albeit not through technological means this time. The four awaken to discover, apparently, that the last four years of their lives has actually been simulated via virtual reality software, Red Dwarf – The Total Immersion Video Game. And also, that they've played it appallingly, constantly missing experience improving perks, special skills and failing to solve supposedly simple puzzles.

Outside of the game, Cat is no longer a libido-powered doyen of vanity, but a buck-toothed nerd by the name of Duane Dibbley, and Rimmer's the tramp half-brother of Craig Charles' Lister – now the head of a secret police force. But it's all a hallucination – the "real" lives aren't real at all, but visions brought on by a creature called, seriously now, a despair squid, which was trying to make the crew commit suicide.

A scene from the "Back To Reality" episode of 'Red Dwarf', first broadcast on March the 26th, 1992

Of course, in 1992 the idea of assuming another believable identity through a video game was completely fanciful – and that sentiment remained a year later when "Gunmen of the Apocalypse" aired in October 1993. But with its headsets (sort of, very roughly) resembling what we saw with Sega's aborted VR hardware and the arcades-bothering/dominating Virtuality machines, and the plot pushing the four down the avenue of a single, shared fantasy, this was an episode that foreshadowed the VR multiplayer experiences being sold in the here and now, like Ubisoft's Star Trek Bridge Crew.

Lister, Cat, Rimmer and Kryten – the first three gifted special, very video game-y abilities – find themselves in a simulated Wild West town, in a game called Streets of Laredo, on a mission to defeat a computer virus that threatens to send their vessel (the smaller Starbug, at this point of the show's overarching story) careering into a nearby sun. The virus manifests itself in the simulation, accessed via flip-screen on-board headsets that look like they're made from Stickle Bricks and spit, as the Apocalypse Boys, a gang of vicious criminals based on the famous Four Horsemen. Kryten, the town's sheriff, ultimately overcomes his fear to find an antidote to the virus and, at the episode's climax, do away with the Apocalypse Boys without loosing a single bullet, merely a few birds.

"Gunmen…" borrowed from all kinds of Western film and fiction, including Rio Bravo and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But while sometimes shameless in its appropriating of established genre tropes, it stood out amongst Red Dwarf's typical one-shot-style episodes, winning an International Emmy in 1994. Personally, it sent my mind reeling: how far are we, I'm sure I wondered, from this kind of virtual world becoming somewhere that any of us can visit, albeit ideally without a death-dealing quartet of evil gunmen.

A scene from the "Gunmen of the Apocalypse" episode of 'Red Dwarf', first broadcast on October the 21st, 1993

As it transpires, about 22 years, as here we are in 2016 with genuinely immersive VR gaming about to become a commercial reality. I feel like I've been waiting for this moment ever since I saw "Gunmen…" and allowed myself to dream about what it'd be like to assume the role, completely, of someone else – somebody so far away from my own everyday. So far, in VR, I've climbed Everest, engaged in dogfights in the stars, failed to escape a house stalked by a psychopath, been Batman, and so much more – but if ever there was a time to make "Gunmen…" into a game proper, and deliver Red Dwarf's fanbase the first-ever (so far as I know, anyway – corrections to the usual address) video game based on the Grant Naylor sitcom (okay, there was an unofficial text game in 1996 apparently, but I'm saying it doesn't count), it's now, with British TV channel Dave again reviving the series for an eleventh run this autumn.

Who, who ever loved this show, wouldn't want to saddle up beside the Riviera Kid and Brett Riverboat? Dave, come on, surely it's in the budget, somewhere, to make this happen. You've enough in the coffers to keep Greg Davies in dunkable biscuits, and he is a big man, so a little VR splash should be no problem at all. But maybe leave the noir-styled car-shagging out of the equation. Nobody looks cool in VR as it is, before any bumping and grinding is involved.

@MikeDiver

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