NEW YORK — Retired outfielder Johnny Damon was back competing at Yankee Stadium on Friday, only this time he wasn’t wearing pinstripes on the ballfield but a Puma polo shirt and Playstation virtual-reality headset. His hands held glowing controllers, as he twisted, punched and gyrated in the middle of an upstairs conference room.
Damon, the two-time World Series champion with the Boston Red Sox and New York yankees, was coming in what CCP Games is touting as the first vSport, or VR sport: Sparc, its newly released title with immersive, 360-degree visuals. Players hurl virtual balls at each other in what Damon described as a hybrid between tennis and dodgeball. Those wanting to experience the action from his perspective can download this clip.
The son of a serviceman and avid supporter of military programs, Damon played online against U.S. troops stationed at bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait via the Pro vs. GI Joe program.
“We’ve been waiting for games like this since we were kids, and the future is here now. It’s amazing,” Damon said afterwards, while ruing a couple of defeats. “I’m trying to figure out how to defend that hard bounce-ball. They figured that out, and it’s just going everywhere. You can’t stop it. That’s how they’ve been getting me.”
CCP Games’ senior director of communications, Adam Kahn, said game play was designed to have a “simple, super-easy-to-understand concept” but the “mastery curve” was steep. (His description harkened the tagline from the old Othello board game: “A minute to learn . . . a lifetime to master.”)
“The No. 1 goal is, we want to entertain people,” Kahn said.
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Sparc was the product of four years of development by CCP Games. Back in 2013, the Atlanta-based office of the Icelandic company hired what Kahn called “eight special forces, amazing tech gurus” with VR interest, and they had a simple charge: “You don’t have to come up with a game. Just experiment with virtual reality and what you can do and what is possible.”
Various iterations of development included tossing discs, kicking boxes and throwing fireballs with one’s hands and feet, a la the “old-school Kinect games,” Kahn said, referring to Microsoft’s motion-sensing console system from earlier this decade. The disc game showed the most potential and evolved into the ball-throwing Sparc vSport.
Damon alternately called the game play “contagious” and “freaky” — in a good way, for its all-consuming portal into the virtual dimension — while acknowledging how arduous the action can be. By afternoon’s end, sweat stains were visible through his shirt.
“Sparc is a great, full-body workout, as you can see,” he said. “The good thing is I don’t have to go for a run later on tonight.”
An avid gamer, Damon said his current interests have been the EA Sports’ Madden and FIFA games but is interested to see more of what VR can offer.
“I know they’re creating virtual reality games for soccer, golf and all that stuff,” he said. “Yeah, I can’t wait to see all the games that are going to be coming out in the near future, but this is pretty realistic.”