It was the summer of 1995, and I was working at Electronics Boutique in the Woodland Mall—one of those summer jobs you take because employee discounts on games seemed more valuable than actual money. The store had just received our display unit of Nintendo’s newest “portable” console, the Virtual Boy. I put “portable” in quotes because, well, have you seen this thing? It was about as portable as a microwave oven with a kickstand.
I’d been hyping this weird red contraption to customers for weeks based solely on Nintendo Power screenshots and the promise of “true 3D gaming,” whatever that meant. Remember, this was 1995—the year of the first Toy Story movie. 3D anything was mind-blowing. So when my manager said I could take the demo unit home for the weekend after we closed on Friday, I nearly knocked over a cardboard cutout of Donkey Kong in my excitement.
I should’ve known something was off when he added, “Just, uh, take some aspirin with you.” Cryptic warning? Absolutely. Did I heed it? Not a chance.
The Virtual Boy was the brainchild of Gunpei Yokoi, the same Nintendo genius who created the Game Boy and those Game & Watch handhelds that ate up so much of my elementary school years. The guy was a legitimate legend, which made the Virtual Boy all the more baffling. It’s like finding out Spielberg directed Howard the Duck. How does this happen?
The technology itself was fascinating in that “so crazy it might work” way. Instead of a traditional screen, the Virtual Boy used a pair of linear arrays (rows of LEDs) with oscillating mirrors to create the illusion of depth. The whole setup was housed in this retro-futuristic headset that sat on a bipod stand. You couldn’t wear it—you had to lean forward and press your face into this thing like some medieval torture device. And everything, absolutely EVERYTHING, was displayed in varying shades of red against black backgrounds.
Why red? Apparently, red LEDs were the cheapest at the time. That’s it. That was the reason. Not some artistic choice or technical breakthrough—just good old-fashioned cost-cutting. Nintendo literally saw the future through rose-colored glasses because it saved them a few bucks per unit.
I lugged the awkward contraption home on the bus, getting curious looks from elderly passengers who probably thought I was carrying specialized medical equipment. My roommate Jeff was equally mystified. “Is that a virtual reality thing?” he asked. “Sort of,” I answered, which was both technically true and completely misleading.
Setting it up on our coffee table—a repurposed door on milk crates, peak 90s apartment decor—I adjusted the display stand to what seemed like a comfortable viewing angle. The Virtual Boy came with a controller that looked like a boomerang with buttons, with matching red-on-black color scheme. It actually felt pretty good in the hands, which made the visual experience all the more disappointing by comparison.
The unit came with Mario Tennis pre-installed, so that was my first Virtual Boy experience. I pressed my face against the rubber eyepiece, adjusted the focus slider, and…whoa. I won’t lie, that initial moment was legitimately cool. The tennis court had DEPTH. The ball moved TOWARD you and AWAY from you. For about fifteen seconds, I thought Nintendo had actually done it—they’d created affordable VR!
Then the headaches started. Not right away, but about twenty minutes in. It began as a dull throb behind my eyes, like the warning tremors before a migraine earthquake. The manual (yes, I actually read it, shocking) recommended taking a break every 15-30 minutes, but c’mon—what gamer actually stops playing that frequently? That’s barely enough time to get through the tutorial in most games.
The red monochrome display was the biggest issue. After a while, it felt like someone was slowly pressing hot pennies into my eye sockets. Remember those Magic Eye books that were popular back then? It was like staring at one of those for hours, except instead of eventually seeing a dolphin or whatever, your reward was nausea and questioning your life choices.
The ergonomics were equally problematic. Since you couldn’t actually wear the Virtual Boy, you had to maintain this awkward hunched position, face pressed against the viewfinder, neck craned forward. After an hour, I felt like I’d aged forty years. My back hurt. My neck hurt. My eyes felt like I’d been swimming in chlorine. I was the human equivalent of a Windows 95 crash.
Despite the physical discomfort, I was determined to give the Virtual Boy a fair shake. I’d convinced my manager to let me borrow Wario Land along with the system, and it was genuinely a good game—probably the best in the Virtual Boy’s limited library. The platforming actually made clever use of the 3D effect, with Wario moving between foreground and background layers. If this game had been on the SNES with traditional graphics, people would still be talking about it today.
But that red display, man. That eye-searing, migraine-inducing red display. After about two hours total (with breaks), I had to stop. Jeff took a turn and lasted about half as long before dramatically flopping onto the couch and declaring he’d “seen the future, and it’s trying to kill us.”
The next day, determined to power through the discomfort (ah, the resilience of youth), I tried adjusting every possible setting. The Virtual Boy had a focus slider and an adjustable stand, and I played with both extensively. Too high, too low, slightly to the left—nothing helped. It was like trying to find a comfortable position on a bed of slightly damp Legos.
What’s wild is that despite the physical discomfort, there was something undeniably intriguing about the technology. Playing Galactic Pinball gave me a genuine sense of depth that traditional games couldn’t match. The ball really felt like it was rolling around a three-dimensional table. For brief moments, when I could ignore my growing headache, I caught glimpses of what Nintendo was trying to achieve.
By Sunday night, I’d sampled everything the Virtual Boy had to offer at that point—all four games. That’s not a typo. The system launched with FOUR games in North America, and two of them were variations on tennis. This was from Nintendo, the company that made sure the NES launched with Super Mario Bros., a game so good people still speedrun it almost 40 years later.
The limited game library turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Had there been more games, I might have done permanent damage to my occipital lobe. I returned the Virtual Boy to the store on Monday with mixed feelings and a lingering headache. I’d seen the future of gaming, and it was painful.
Customers would often ask me about the Virtual Boy after my weekend experience, and I’d find myself in that awkward retail position of needing to be honest without actively discouraging sales. “It’s definitely unique,” I’d say, or “The 3D effect is pretty cool, but take the break recommendations seriously.” I was the master of damning with faint praise.
The Virtual Boy became one of Nintendo’s most notorious commercial failures, discontinued after less than a year on the market with only 22 games ever released worldwide. In North America, we got a grand total of 14 titles. My store slashed prices repeatedly until we were practically giving them away, and we still had trouble moving units.
Poor Gunpei Yokoi. The Virtual Boy’s failure reportedly contributed to his departure from Nintendo after an incredible 30-year career. The guy who brought us the D-pad and the Game Boy deserved a better final act.
Years later, I stumbled across a Virtual Boy at a garage sale for $25, complete with five games and the original box. I bought it without hesitation—partially out of nostalgia, partially because I knew they were becoming collector’s items. Its modern collector value has actually risen considerably, with complete systems in good condition fetching hundreds of dollars. Mine sits on a shelf in my game room, a conversation piece and a reminder of an ambitious failure.
What’s fascinating is how the Virtual Boy, for all its flaws, was still an important step in gaming’s VR evolution. Nintendo was trying to create an affordable 3D gaming experience decades before the Oculus Rift or PlayStation VR. They were just limited by the technology (and apparently the budget) of the time. The Virtual Boy walked—or rather stumbled awkwardly—so modern VR could run.
When I first tried a modern VR headset around 2016, I had instant flashbacks to that summer weekend with the Virtual Boy. The fundamental concept was similar—stereoscopic 3D creating the illusion of depth—but the execution was worlds apart. No migraine-inducing red display, no awkward tabletop stand, and most importantly, no feeling like your eyeballs were being slowly roasted over an open flame.
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Nintendo had just waited a few more years, refined the technology, added actual colors, and made the thing wearable instead of mounted on a stand. Would VR gaming have taken off a decade earlier? Would we be on our fifth or sixth generation of VR headsets by now?
The Virtual Boy was ahead of its time in concept but behind its time in execution. Its awkward controller design—which actually wasn’t terrible, just weird—tried to solve the problem of navigating 3D space before developers had really figured out how to make 3D games intuitive. The display stand adjustments, while offering theoretical flexibility, couldn’t compensate for the fundamental design flaw of making players hold a fixed position for extended periods.
In retrospect, the Virtual Boy feels like one of those necessary failures in technology—an evolutionary dead end that nevertheless taught valuable lessons. Nintendo learned to be more cautious with experimental hardware (at least until the Wii U, but that’s another story). The gaming industry learned that players will only tolerate physical discomfort up to a point, no matter how novel the experience.
And me? I learned that no matter how exciting new technology seems, maybe—just maybe—you should listen when your manager cryptically suggests bringing pain relievers along for the experience. That’s advice that transcends gaming and applies to life in general, I think. That, and never trust anything that only comes in red and black. Except maybe licorice. Licorice has never given me a migraine.
