“Was This Their Intention? To Crash my Dimension?”

“It’s Not Playin’ Around: It’s For REAL!”
Wholly immersive virtual art by @morkitten.

Nintendo as a hardware manufacturer is commonly associated with gimmickry — pairing [typically] underpowered consoles with novelty controllers or whatever other oddball peripheral have you. From the early days of the Nintendo Entertainment System’s “Robotic Operating Buddy” to the core design of the Nintendo Switch of today, Nintendo seems as committed as ever to setting their consoles apart from the competition in non-traditional ways. And in markets where there isn’t already existing competition, Nintendo dives in headfirst and sets the standards that latecomers will have to try and follow.

In the early 90s, there was a brief boom in the field of “virtual reality” technology. Though this fad would be short-lived, with public and corporate interest beginning to wane by 1994, Nintendo had already committed to plans to bring virtual reality into the consumer living room — potentially even on the go. In mid-1995, the Nintendo Virtual Boy was released to a public whose enthusiasm for VR was already exhausted, and only for the console to be discontinued within a year’s time. The Virtual Boy remains one of Nintendo’s most notable “failures” in the games industry, if not one of the most notorious flop consoles of all time.

Most folk who follow the games industry seem to have no difficulty pointing out “what went wrong” with the Virtual Boy; making it look like its issues should’ve been obvious, and that it never stood a fighting chance. But the stories behind failed games and consoles are rarely as cut-and-dry as they are made to seem. Look, I’m not gonna tell you “what you think you know about the Virtual Boy is wrong,” or claim that the console was some sort of secret success. But over the course of this article, I am going to try my best to give the console a fair shake, demonstrate its range as a games console, and to extol some of its several virtues.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Obviously, the illusion of 3D is a tricky thing to try and convey here. In recording gameplay footage for this article, I used an emulator which rendered the Virtual Boy’s dual displays as overlapping red and cyan layers, which may presumably work if you happen to have a pair of red-cyan-filtered glasses? But I’m stereoblind to begin with, and so I’m not really the best judge of this sort of thing. That said, anaglyph 3D animated GIFs in red-cyan are available to you if you click on any of the gameplay images below.