The Virtual Boy was released in 1995. It wasn’t wildly successful, but was roughly the start of home VR gaming. There were many VR arcade games and attractions after that in the intervening years until the Oculus DK1 and “modern” VR in 2010. That’s ignoring the really early VR stuff in the 70s and 80s. Just because we have had major breakthroughs in the last 14 years with consumer cost doesn’t mean time starts there.

Palmer Luckey didn’t invent VR at 16 in his garage out of whole cloth without the decades of tangible growth and development done in the prior 2-3 decades. His breakthroughs in latency paved the way for the the current renaissance in consumer home VR, not minimizing his contributions, but VR didn’t start with him, nor Valve, nor HTC.