Summer of ’95, and there I was working at Electronics Boutique in Woodland Mall – you know, one of those retail gigs you take because the employee discount on games feels more valuable than actual money. Which, honestly, it kind of was when you’re nineteen and your biggest expense is Taco Bell.
Our store had just gotten the display unit for Nintendo’s newest creation, this bizarre red contraption called the Virtual Boy. I’d been talking it up to customers for weeks based entirely on Nintendo Power screenshots and Nintendo’s promise of “true 3D gaming.” Keep in mind, this was the same year Toy Story came out, so anything 3D seemed like actual magic.
My manager Dave – cool guy, terrible at predicting which games would sell – said I could take the demo unit home for the weekend. I nearly knocked over our life-size Donkey Kong standee rushing to say yes. Should’ve paid more attention when he added, “Just, uh, maybe grab some Advil on your way home.” Classic Dave, being mysteriously ominous about everything.
The Virtual Boy was Gunpei Yokoi’s baby, which made the whole thing even more confusing. This is the guy who created the Game Boy, the D-pad, those Game & Watch handhelds that got me through boring family dinners in elementary school. The man was a legitimate genius. Finding out he made the Virtual Boy was like discovering Miyamoto secretly directed that awful Super Mario Bros. movie.
The tech behind it was actually pretty clever, in a “mad scientist in his garage” kind of way. Instead of screens, it used LED arrays with oscillating mirrors to trick your brain into seeing depth. Everything was mounted in this sci-fi looking headset that sat on a tripod stand. You couldn’t wear the thing – you had to lean over and mash your face into it like you were getting an eye exam from a robot doctor. And everything, literally everything, was red. Bright, eye-searing red against black.
Why red? Get this – red LEDs were cheaper. That’s it. Not some brilliant artistic vision or technical breakthrough. Just Nintendo being cheap. They made us see the future through rose-colored glasses because it saved them like three bucks per unit.
I hauled this awkward thing home on the bus Friday night, getting weird looks from other passengers who probably thought I was transporting some kind of medical device. My roommate Kevin took one look at it and goes, “Dude, is that VR?” Sort of, I told him. Which was both completely true and totally misleading.
Setting it up on our coffee table – which was actually just a door balanced on milk crates, peak college apartment furniture – I adjusted the stand to what seemed comfortable. The controller was this weird boomerang shape with the same red-and-black color scheme. Actually felt pretty decent in your hands, which made everything else more disappointing by comparison.
The system came with Mario Tennis, so that was my introduction to “3D gaming.” I pressed my face against the rubber eyepiece, fiddled with the focus slider, and…okay, I’ll admit it. For about thirty seconds, I was genuinely impressed. The tennis court had actual depth. The ball moved toward you and away from you. I thought Nintendo had cracked the code on affordable virtual reality.
Then my head started hurting. Not immediately – took maybe twenty minutes before I felt this dull throbbing behind my eyes, like the opening act for a full-blown migraine. The manual said to take breaks every fifteen to thirty minutes, but come on. What self-respecting gamer stops playing every half hour? That’s barely enough time to figure out the controls.
That red display was brutal. After an hour, it felt like someone was slowly pressing hot coins into my eye sockets. Remember those Magic Eye books that were everywhere in the ’90s? Imagine staring at one for three hours straight, except instead of eventually seeing a hidden sailboat, your reward is nausea and existential dread.
The ergonomics were just as bad. Since you couldn’t actually wear the Virtual Boy, you had to stay hunched over in this terrible position, face smooshed against the viewfinder, neck bent like you’re looking into a microscope. After ninety minutes, I felt like I’d spent the day doing construction work. My back ached, my neck was killing me, and my eyes felt sandblasted.
But I was determined to give it a fair shot, you know? I’d also borrowed Wario Land from the store, and honestly, that game was pretty solid. Great game, actually. The platforming made clever use of the 3D effect, with Wario moving between different layers of the environment. If that game had been on SNES with normal graphics, people would probably consider it a classic.
But man, that display. That soul-crushing red display. After about two hours total – with breaks, because I’m not completely stupid – I had to stop. Kevin tried it next and lasted maybe forty-five minutes before dramatically collapsing on our futon and announcing he’d “seen the future of gaming, and it wants to murder us.”
Saturday, I figured maybe I just needed to find the right settings. The Virtual Boy had an adjustable focus slider and you could move the stand around, so I spent like an hour trying different configurations. Higher, lower, tilted left, tilted right – nothing helped. It was like trying to get comfortable sleeping on a pile of wet Legos.
The weird thing is, despite feeling like my retinas were being slowly barbecued, there was something genuinely cool about the technology. Playing Galactic Pinball actually gave you this sense of depth that regular games couldn’t touch. The pinball really felt like it was bouncing around a three-dimensional table. When I could ignore my developing migraine, I caught glimpses of what Nintendo was going for.
By Sunday evening, I’d played through the entire Virtual Boy launch library. All four games. Four! This was Nintendo, the company that launched the NES with Super Mario Bros., one of the greatest games ever made. And they thought four games – two of which were tennis variations – would be enough to sell this red monstrosity.
Actually turned out to be a blessing. If there had been more games, I might’ve done permanent damage to my vision trying to play them all. I returned the Virtual Boy Monday morning with mixed feelings and a lingering headache that lasted until Wednesday.
Customers kept asking me about it after that weekend, which put me in this awkward position of needing to be honest without completely torpedoing sales. “It’s…unique,” I’d tell them. “The 3D effect is interesting, but definitely follow those break recommendations.” I became the king of diplomatic non-recommendations.
The Virtual Boy became one of Nintendo’s biggest disasters, discontinued after less than a year. Only got 22 games worldwide, 14 in North America. Our store kept slashing prices until we were practically paying people to take them, and we still couldn’t move inventory.
Poor Gunpei Yokoi. Word was that the Virtual Boy’s failure contributed to him leaving Nintendo after three decades. Guy who invented the Game Boy and the D-pad deserved better than having his career end with a machine that gave people migraines.
Few years back, I found one at a garage sale for twenty-five bucks, complete with box and five games. Bought it immediately – partly nostalgia, partly because I knew they were becoming collectibles. They go for hundreds now if you’ve got the complete setup. Mine sits on a shelf in my game room, this weird monument to ambitious failure.
What’s crazy is how the Virtual Boy was actually important for VR development, even though it sucked. Nintendo was trying to make affordable 3D gaming work twenty years before Oculus or PlayStation VR. They just got stuck with 1995 technology and what was apparently a shoestring budget. The Virtual Boy stumbled face-first into a table so modern VR could eventually run.
When I first tried an actual VR headset around 2016, I immediately thought about that painful weekend with the Virtual Boy. Same basic concept – stereoscopic displays tricking your brain into seeing depth – but the execution was light-years apart. No migraine-inducing red, no awkward table setup, and most importantly, no feeling like your eyeballs were being slow-roasted.
Makes me wonder what would’ve happened if Nintendo had just waited five more years, figured out color displays, made the thing actually wearable instead of mounting it on a tripod. Would VR have taken off in the early 2000s? Would we be playing VR games in our flying cars by now?
The Virtual Boy was ahead of its time conceptually but way behind practically. Even the controller, which wasn’t actually terrible, tried to solve 3D navigation before anyone really knew how to make 3D games that didn’t suck. All those display adjustments couldn’t fix the fundamental problem of making people hold uncomfortable positions for hours.
Looking back, the Virtual Boy feels like one of those necessary failures in tech history – an evolutionary dead end that still taught important lessons. Nintendo learned to be more careful with experimental hardware, at least until the Wii U. The industry learned that novelty can only overcome so much physical discomfort. And I learned that when your manager mysteriously suggests bringing painkillers to try new gaming hardware, maybe pay attention to that warning.
Sometimes I fire up my garage sale Virtual Boy for a few minutes, just to remind myself how far we’ve come. Still gives me a headache. Still makes my neck hurt. Still feels like staring into the red gates of gaming hell. But for those brief moments when it worked – when the 3D effect clicked and you forgot about the pain – you could see what Nintendo was reaching for. They just grabbed it with their eyes closed and hands covered in oven mitts.
That’s the Virtual Boy in a nutshell, really. A brilliant idea executed so poorly it became a cautionary tale. At least it looked cool sitting on store shelves, even if actually using it felt like punishment for unknown crimes. And hey, it made me appreciate every gaming headache I haven’t gotten since 1995. That’s something, right?
Samuel’s been gaming since the Atari 2600 and still thinks 16-bit was the golden age. Between accounting gigs and parenting teens, he keeps the CRTs humming in his Minneapolis basement, writing about cartridge quirks, console wars, and why pixel art never stopped being beautiful.
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