VRMan3D Archive - Story
VRMan3D Archive

The 3D screensavers of Fred Cass, known as VRMan, kept running on modern Windows.

History

The story of VRMan

Fred Cass has gone by VRMan, short for Virtual Reality Man, since the 1980s. In the late 1990s, when 3dfx Voodoo and other 3D cards were arriving in home PCs, he wrote screensavers that showed off what those cards could do, and gave most of them away.

Before the screensavers

On his blog, Fred describes working as a consultant for Digital Equipment Corporation, where he developed a 3D environment called VisualReality that shipped with DEC's Celebris GL line of PCs. He was experimenting with real-time 3D and virtual worlds well before consumer 3D cards existed.

The screensavers

VRChristmas was the hit. Version 2.0, released December 17, 1998, was credited to 3D Amigos Inc, VRMan and Fred Cass. Japan's 窓の杜 described ornaments flying through the air, a toy train running along the floor, and orchestral Christmas music. Version 3.0 later circulated as vrxmas30.zip, and the shareware site TopShareware listed it as downloaded more than 4 million times and one of the very first 3D-accelerated screensavers.

3D Tidal Forces pulls hundreds of objects through glowing tunnels and around artificial black holes. Version 2.1, dated March 6, 1999, was free and ran on Direct3D. A paid upgrade, TidalForcesXL, was sold as shareware. Tidal Forces 2.1 also turned up on the cover CD of the Danish magazine Datatid in February 2000.

vrFireWorks was already being passed around by June 1999, when a "4th of July Fireworks" desktop theme bundled it as "a marvelous free screensaver by Fred Cass."

vrFlightSaver put you in charge of a radio-controlled plane dropping paint balloons on a bullseye. It isn't in this archive yet. People still remember it on retro PC forums like VOGONS, and one parent wrote to VRMan that his sons came running whenever it started so they could "Shoot the rockets" and "Drop the bombs."

3DSnowDesk, a small freeware program, piled up to 20,000 3D snowflakes along the bottom of the Windows desktop and turned the mouse into a snowblower. We're still looking for a copy.

Pushing the hardware

VRMan's screensavers were written for the new 3D accelerators, and they worked them hard. In a May 1998 review of the Creative 3D Blaster Voodoo2, the Russian site iXBT found its test system hung after about 20 minutes of running screensavers, including VRMan's, until the card was slowed to 80 MHz. With a fan added, it ran at 95 MHz.

Years later the opposite problem showed up. A 2003 forum post pointing people to vrxmas30.zip warned that it ran a little too fast on the CPUs of the day.

The lost source code

In a January 2008 blog post titled "VRMan Starting over...", Fred wrote that all of the source code for his older screensavers had been deliberately destroyed, backups included, and that bringing them back would mean starting from scratch. That is why this archive keeps the original files exactly as released, and why vrChristmas 2026 was written new rather than updated.

A 2004 post shows what Fred called a fully functioning replica of the VRMan logo from 1997: a 3D plane from vrFlightSaver flying over a real 3dfx Voodoo board, made with help from a designer called =[ Aegis ]=.

vrFlightSaver screenshot from VRMan's blog
vrFlightSaver, from VRMan's blog.

Timeline

Still missing

vrFlightSaver, 3DSnowDesk, TidalForcesXL, VRChristmas 2.0 and earlier, vrman.com-era readmes and screenshots. If you have any of them, or remember where VRMan's screensavers showed up (a magazine CD, a PC that came with them, a review), please get in touch.