>>280447987
Not a coincidence. I remember being trapped in a video game especially in fantasy game was quite common during that time in both western and japanese media. For example I remember Fairy Oddparents had an early episode with that premise. Kim Possible had a WoW parody and in the final phases of the episode Ron and the girl of the week were trapped in the virtual world of the WoW parody.
Yugioh had two filler arcs where they were trapped inside virtual worlds the first one was even straight up isekai like fantasy. The machines they were trapped in looked like the VR machines in the proto-SAO doujin.