Nintendo Virtual Boy - First attempts at Virtual Reality

If there was a contest for the weirdest gaming console ever, there would certainly be a lot of contenders. For example, I read crushing review of Action Max from Worlds of Wonder – that was a console that only used a light pistol as its controller. The “game” was on a VHS cassette, you put it into the player and the console itself only registered whether you “hit” the target that was blinking on the screen. Obviously, this console wasn’t much a success – this is probably the reason why the worlds population of epileptics didn’t die out in the year 1987 it was first presented.

But my personal candidate for the most epic fail is Virtual Boy from Nintendo (1995). The thing that is interesting about it, is the fact that it combines a progressive attempt at making virtual reality with a horrible real world implementation, endangering the Mario brand and an intensive marketing campaign that almost broke the most successful home console maker of that time. No, it wasn’t purely a bad idea, but it never should have came further then just being a prototype. The fact that Nintendo decided to bring this product to the marketwas as good an idea as trying to open an anti-air grenade with a chainsaw, while having your girlfriends mother assist you.

Virtual boy were these weird glasses on two stands. You sat to it, put it on or attempted to sit in a way to look into this weird periscope thingy. Even though the system claimed to be using virtual reality, it didn’t detect head movements, it used a classic controller. One colored stereoscopic red images were created by oscillating mirrors, which not only made the Virtual Boy excessively loud but could also induce severe headaches. Due to the limited raw power of the console the image itself had a very low resolution – but mainly, playing with the Virtual Boy was awfully unpleasant. It’s really hard to understand how something like this could have been sold for reals.

While Nintendo managed to sell about three quarters of a million of Virtual Boy consoles, the system didn’t win the hearths of of its users and about a year after its initial released was taken of the market. Gunpei Yokoi – the author of the system was forced to leave Nintendo with dishonor.

Not that the idea of a “real 3D console” was bad on itself, but this attempt was just bad.