There's one detail in the gozooze reddit post that keeps bugging me. Both they and their friend got to try out a VR prototype and I wonder if that experience lasted way longer than gozooze thinks. What if the Junji Ito pinball machine was a virtual reality, never a physical reality? I know there's people posting evidence, but that's easily doctored. The machine was at the very least never registered. I wonder (without much joy, I might add! I want this to be true as much as the rest of you! maybe even more!) if it wasn't all a digital dream. (Which would be it's own kind of enigma, of course.)

There has been VR since at least 1985, so it's definitely possible that the technology was already more advanced whenever gozooze's visit happened. You know, like color TV being invented at about the same time as black and white.

Sega was toying with VR as early as 1991. This headset never made it to market, but it was clearly something they were interested in for a long time. The problem here, I think, is in figuring out what happened in that decade in between. I could see Ito going for something more immersive and groundbreaking (especially for the time) to launch a new initiative of Sega's - but then again, they could have just done it as an internal project without Ito involved at all if they never expected it to see the light of day (which it sounds like it shouldn't have given how some of the folks responses here who claim to have played it). At the time, the tech would have been bad enough that it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect headaches, nausea, even possible neurological things like flashing lights that we have a lot more safeguards for today.

It's definitely throwing me for a loop that there seems to be this physical and VR duality going on. It could also be a sort of proto-AR (augmented reality) where it displayed visuals on top of a physical cabinet (which sounds awesome and trippy as hell for Ito stuff).

I think it might not be VR but one of those video pinball games. The ones that you could make your own machines. 

“too realistic” 🤔 realistic enough to appear like a real physical pinball machine?

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 

Hmm, found this. Hard to tell if it's the same thing as the video or the incubase studio thing:
https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/short-reads/article/2057897/manga-h...