In the main thread we were talking about Joe Blackwell who seems to be the main designer on the manual cover (he's in the center at least) and he has a 2002 patent for some sort of interconnected pinball tournament system:
At a minimum, this implies a few machines even for a prototype. And the "network/tournament server" is super vague. I wonder if there were a few machines made around 2001 when the original poster claims to have seen it and the VR component was wrapped up in the network? More info here: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7070506B1/en?inventor=Joe+Blackwell