If you asked me to list the ways I thought Elton John might one day announce his retirement from touring, "a splashy, CGI-filled VR retrospective" would have been nowhere near the top. Maybe in the low teens. Maybe. Yet, that's exactly what he did earlier today—and a few a weeks before that, it's exactly what I'm experiencing in a small, dark room outside LA.

That's where I am in corporeal form, at least. Inside the VR headset I'm wearing, I'm in a different small, dark room in southern California: West Hollywood's iconic Troubadour nightclub in 1970, peering into the bespectacled, CGI-ed face of a 23-year-old Elton John while he sings “Your Song.” It’s a recreation of his first US concert, the one that catapulted him to global fame, and as I glide weightlessly around his piano, thousands of golden specks—metaphorical stardust, presumably—fall from the ceiling, swirling around the demure young man at the piano.

Then the scene changes, and so does Elton John. Now I’m onstage in front of a packed Dodgers Stadium during one of the musician's two 1975 shows, and a very sequiny John is pinballing around the stage screaming out “Saturday Night’s Alright For Fighting.” It is, I admit, a little overwhelming. At one point his face swings so close, and has such believable dimension, that I take a big step backward—right into a bundle of what I assume are some very important cords.

The virtual re-creation of John's 1975 Dodger Stadium concert. The oversized sunglasses helped take 40 years off the artist's digital face; the dance moves are professional Elton John impersonator Russ Anderson. Rocket Entertainment

“Let me get you a chair for this part,” says Ben Casey, founder and CEO of Spinifex Group, the creative studio/digital agency/production company behind this extravaganza. I take a seat, and just in time—the ground falls away and I zoom into outer space, float around in Elton John’s cocaine party of a private jet and some lava-lamp looking nebulas, and traverse a whirling yellow brick road back down to Earth. All the while, images from The Lion King and Gnomeo and Juliet flash by, along with other visions of John throughout his career.

When the intergalactic acid trip ends and I emerge from my headset—a little dizzy, completely overstimulated, with “Rocket Man” firmly stuck in my head—that little corner of Spinifex’s offices seems even darker and smaller and grayer. Clearly, I was wrong: Turns out a VR experience like Farewell Yellow Brick Road: The Legacy is the most Elton John announcement anybody could have hoped for.

Storyboards sketching out the fourth act of Farewell Yellow Brick Road: The Legacy. Rocket Entertainment

The Elton Factor

And of course it is. The very existence of this event—the VR experience that was just simul-blasted to headset-wearing audiences at events in New York, Los Angeles, and London, followed by a concert and Q&A livestreamed by YouTube to fans around the world, all to announce his upcoming final tour—is a testament to the creative clout and staggering influence wielded by John and his team. “Working with these guys felt very much like rocking up to palaces and talking to rulers of the Emirates or officials in China,” Casey says. (Both are things he's actually done.) “There’s this assumption that they’re going to do the next big thing.”