Remember When Virtua Racing Caused Prank Phone Calls?

[admin]

​

It's funny what your brain chooses to remember and what it decides to forget.

For example, I can't remember what I ate for lunch yesterday, but I can recall with pinpoint accuracy the fact that it was reported in an early issue of EDGE magazine that the Mega Drive port of Virtua Racing caused cordless phones to ring. (It's kind of a superpower that I have, but one that has very little use in the real world.)

This memory was instantly triggered by a tweet from video game historian John Harrison, who asked where the rumor had originated.

​

The issue of EDGE, which appears to be the "smoking gun", dates back to July 1994, with the publication mentioning that there had been several reports of the import version of the game causing cordless phones to ring.

​

This was later followed up in issue 12 by a concerned employee of British Telecom, who apparently was worried it would cause havoc when the game arrived in the United Kingdom.

​

So, if this isn't a rumor, why did Virtua Racing cause cordless phones to ring? It's almost certainly due to the frequency at which the SVP chip found inside the cartridge runs, as this was the only game that featured it.

Were you posh enough to own a cordless phone which was impacted by this issue back in the day? Let us know with a comment.