Virtual Boy: the bizarre rise and rapid fall of Nintendo’s enigmatic red console

Nearly 30 years after the launch of Virtual Boy, little is known about exactly how Nintendo became interested in developing what would ultimately become its ill-fated console. Was Nintendo committed to VR as the future of video games and looking for technological solutions that made business sense? Or was the Virtual Boy primarily the result of Nintendo going off-script and seizing a unique, and perhaps risky, opportunity that presented itself? The answer is probably a bit of both.

It turns out that the Virtual Boy wasn’t an anomaly in Nintendo’s history of video game platforms. Rather, it was the result of a deliberate strategy, consistent with Nintendo’s way of doing things and informed by the design philosophy of its lead creator, Gunpei Yokoi.

Are you getting into virtual reality?

The late 1980s and 1990s were a heady time for virtual reality, and when it came to generating public interest, Japan was arguably in the lead. In May 1991, Hattori Katsura’s project Jinkō genjitsukan no sekai (The world of artificial reality feeling) has been published. It is the first successful mainstream book on virtual reality, beating Howard Rheingold’s landmark book on virtual reality by a few months. Japan is also “the country where virtual reality was first repackaged as a consumer technology” and, by 1991, there were more virtual reality systems than anywhere else in the world.

However, VR was neither presented nor perceived in the same way in Japan as it was in the United States. First, while VR research in the United States has been largely developed and driven by military interests, in Japan it has emerged from the telecommunications context. Second, at least by the mid-1990s, Japanese VR research emphasized engineering rather than computer science as in the United States. Thus, the Japanese public’s perception of VR has been shaped by the additional availability, through public demonstrations for example, of VR devices and experiences different from those presented elsewhere. These devices and experiences have been described in the United States as “cool gadgets” and “weird experiences” but could, taken together, provide alternative insights into the potential of virtual reality as a medium.

See Red: Nintendo’s Virtual Boy by José Zagal and Benj Edwards.”>

Enlarge / You are reading an extract from See Red: Nintendo’s Virtual Boy by José Zagal and Benj Edwards.

Before Virtual Boy’s release, Nintendo designers and engineers expressed at least some interest in virtual reality. For example, when asked by Satoru Iwata about the development of Nintendo’s autostereoscopic Nintendo 3DS, Shigeru Miyamoto said: “At the beginning, back then (just before the creation of the Virtual Boy), I was interested in virtual reality . , and was part of the team that kept talking about how we should do something with 3D glasses. I didn’t really twist his arm, but I was talking with Yokoi-san about the benefits of (3D) glasses.

However, little is known outside of Nintendo whether this interest has led to internal experiments or the development of prototype virtual reality systems. There are some reports, mostly second-hand, that research has been carried out. For example, while researching an article on Virtual Boy for FastCompany, Benj Edwards interviewed Takefumi Makino, Gunpei Yokoi’s biographer and a friend of Yokoi’s during a time close to Yokoi’s death in 1997. According to Makino, Nintendo experimented with virtual reality before creating the Virtual Boy, but found the experience unsatisfying.