An official virtual reality version of Mario Kart is a thing that exists for actual humans to play today.
It’s true.
Unfortunately, there are a few significant caveats. You must travel to Tokyo, Japan. You must pay about $40. You must wait in line for over an hour and a half, if my experience on Saturday afternoon — stretching into evening — was representative.
But it’s worth it.
Mario Kart Arcade GP VR is located at the new Shinjuku outlet of Bandai Namco’s VR Zone arcade. Bandai Namco develops the Mario Kart Arcade GP series under license from Nintendo — it’s been a fixture of Japanese arcades for over a decade.
The VR Zone arcades seem to be doing pretty well since I visited the first one on opening day a year and a half ago; that Odaiba branch featured many of the same attractions in a smaller, less ambitious space, but the Tokyo location is a huge, cavernous arena with a resort theme and projection-mapped light shows that create virtual beaches and cliff faces.
It’s also really busy, and Mario Kart is clearly the main attraction. To play, you have to buy a 4,400 yen (~$39) ticket that lets you choose four VR experiences, only one of which can be Mario Kart. You play it in groups of four, each person sitting in either Mario, Luigi, Peach, or Yoshi’s car. The car frame features a force-feedback steering wheel, and the whole setup moves and shakes in time with the gameplay — it even blows wind into your face. The VR headset is an HTC Vive, as with all the other VR activities in the arcade, and you wear handstraps with Vive Trackers attached so that your arm movements can be detected by the game.
Why is that important? So that you can pick up turtle shells from floating balloons and hurl them at the other players, of course.
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Source: The Verge