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Tetsuya Mizuguchi sits in a swivel chair under a lamp in the middle of a dark, empty room inside an office complex by Aoyama Park in Tokyo. A totem of projectors beams footage from the director's masterwork, Rez, on three of the four walls around him while a polished Sony VR headset warms his feet. Miz, as his friends know the director, has always shown a talent for theatrics. Years earlier, while promoting Child of Eden, another game that splices music, light, and play using emerging technology, he stood before an audience at BAFTA's headquarters in London and conducted the Kinect camera like he was playing the Royal Philharmonic. A day before we meet, he appeared on stage at the sweltering Tokyo Game Show dressed in a jet-black onesie, performing the game that has, in recent months, brought him out of his retreat into academia. Squint and it could have been a member of Daft Punk grinning beneath the helmet. "This is the version of the game that I originally conceived" is the go-to phrase of the film or game director on the PR trail for a remaster (or, in the case of George Lucas, a tic he'd repeat to the beleaguered Star Wars CG staff before he'd finished his breakfast pancake). In Mizuguchi's case, the words have a different, weighty resonance. Sure, Rez Infinite is, when viewed from one angle, little more than a repeat of the same game, re-forged in 4K-resolution (the game can be played, it must be noted, on a television screen; VR is optional). But view the game through the PSVR headset, particularly the new, expansive, freeform Area X, and it's nothing short of revolutionary, the kind of mind-wrecking euphoric dive through another dimension that video games, even in their earliest forms, always promised.
Area X's trick is to free you from Rez's invisible rails which, in the original game, guided your character through its glitchy firework displays as if you were riding a rollercoaster to the centre of the earth. Now you're able to fly through space in whichever direction you choose to look, wheeling in great loop-de-loops through the stars, while firing off fistfuls of neon-tracing homing lasers to light up the murk and keep your path free of foes. What should be disorientating feels effortlessly navigable. What should be nauseating feels clear-headed and sturdy. "Pretty much from the very beginning, when Rez was floating around my head as an idea, its world already existed in a virtual reality-like form," Mizuguchi admits. In 2001, however, VR was an old joke, a futuristic tech that, like Concorde, had been consigned to history. Miz and his team had to settle for flat-screens and rails. "There was a lot of frustration for me," he says. "Maybe even stress in having to squeeze the world into that format. So I made myself a promise: when the time came, this would be the game I'd recreate in virtual reality. I owe it to Rez to make a complete version of that game."
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