However, the 2000 video game The Ring: Terror's Realm borrows a few elements from it, including a simulated reality called the Loop.

Events lead Hideyuki to tell Kaoru more about a research program he was involved in called the LOOP project: a virtual reality simulator which is meant to represent the emergence of life and how the world most likely evolved.

Kaoru takes a part-time job tutoring a boy named Ryoji, who is an asymptomatic carrier of MHC along with his mother, Reiko.

Amano reveals that LOOP utilized a hundred supercomputers strung together with the aim to recreate life, and tells Kaoru of a scientist in New Mexico who might still be alive.

However, inside the scientist's lab, the computer turns itself on and tells Kaoru to put on a pair of virtual reality goggles and gloves, which brings him into the LOOP simulation.

Coming out of the simulation, Kaoru calls Amano and asks for the coordinates of the events that are crucial to the LOOP evolution: the lives of Asakawa, Takayama and Yamamura.

First he looks at things from Ryuji's eyes, then Asakawa, finally settling on a character named Ando who finds out the truth about Sadako.

Desperate to find the cure for the MHC virus, Kaoru ventures deeper west into the desert only to encounter a storm that leaves him on the verge of death.