Nintendo Virtual Boy

» see nintendo.com/virtualboy as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

the virtual boy was nintendo's first 32-bit hardware. it was also nintendo's first hardware designed for tabletop use with the user's face pressed against a visor instead of staring at a tv. the visor housed two 1x224 pixel red led arrays whose light reflected off oscillating mirrors at 50hz, painting a 384x224 image per eye and creating a parallax 3d effect that worked, technically, but at the cost of monochrome red imagery and required head positioning that made multiplayer impossible and long sessions physically uncomfortable.

blue and green leds bright enough for a consumer device existed in 1995 but cost too much. gunpei yokoi chose red because it was the only color the budget could afford, then designed the entire visual experience around that single color. the result was a unit that retailed at $179.95 in the us, came with mario's tennis bundled, and shipped to a market that had just been shown sony's full-color polygonal playstation at the same e3 the virtual boy debuted.

sales never recovered. nintendo discontinued the unit in japan in december 1995, five months after launch. north america limped through one holiday season, then stopped getting new shipments in early 1996, and the format was effectively dead by august of that year. nintendo never held a press conference to announce the discontinuation. they just stopped shipping units and let the inventory clear at $99, then $59, then clearance-bin pricing.

i was eleven when the virtual boy launched. i did not have a console yet. turkey had nintendo's mainline products through grey-import channels but the virtual boy was never officially imported here, and it did not show up in the secondhand market the way the snes or game boy did. this is a console i learned about much later from retrocomputing writeups, not from the original launch cycle. by the time i was old enough to be online (1998 with dial-up) the virtual boy had already been a discontinued curiosity for two years.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was ~

yokoi had built the game boy, the game and watch series, and the d-pad. he was the creative director who had also pushed the snes through development. the virtual boy was the project he believed in past the point his bosses did. the design philosophy he was famous for, "lateral thinking with withered technology," meant building consumer products on top of cheap mature components instead of cutting-edge silicon. the virtual boy was the most extreme application of that philosophy he ever attempted, and the one where it broke.

the games were trying their best. mario's tennis, wario land, virtual boy wario land, red alarm, teleroboxer, panic bomber, jack bros. nintendo's first-party studios shipped real titles with real production values. the platform itself could not support them in the market because nobody wanted to play a console game with their face strapped to a tabletop visor for hours.

~ the day it died ~

yokoi left nintendo in august 1996, the same month the north american virtual boy effectively ceased shipping. his departure was rumored to be tied to the failure but he was also nearing retirement age and had been with nintendo since 1965. he founded a small handheld-design studio called koto, partnered with bandai on the wonderswan, and was killed in a traffic accident on october 4 1997 while inspecting the aftermath of a different traffic accident on the hokuriku expressway. he was 56.

~ the long tail ~

the virtual boy is now collectible. units in good condition with the original tripod and visor cushion sell for $400-600 on ebay. complete-in-box copies of jack bros and virtual boy wario land go for higher. there is a small homebrew development scene around the platform, encouraged by reverse-engineered toolchains and the fact that the unit is one of the only consoles where every released game is documented and emulatable in full.

nintendo never returned to a head-mounted format. the 3ds shipped autostereoscopic 3d in 2011 without a visor, then quietly removed the feature from later hardware revisions. the virtual boy remains the only nintendo console released to retail that was discontinued within a year of launch, and the only one where the company has not officially acknowledged a successor or a lesson learned.

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