To put it simply, the system landed with a tremendous thud. That’s not the end of the Virtual Boy’s issues.
It’s sort of like walking out of a darkened movie theatre and into the afternoon sunlight. Personally, I haven’t had problems with eyestrain or headaches, but when finally taking the device off, having to readjust to ambient light is disorienting. It’s a complaint common with current VR and stereoscopic 3D images some people just get headaches from simulated depth. This could be caused by poor calibration, as the system guides you through focusing the lenses every time you start it up, but some people also are more sensitive to these kinds of images. This is workable, but still very uncomfortable.Ī lot of people also had issues with the 3D display causing eyestrain. The most comfortable way to use the system is to lie back and have it sit on your face with its legs propping it upright. Sitting it on a table and sticking your face into it requires you to either hunch or simply sit stationary in the same position for long periods of time, which can place strain on the neck and back. This brings us to the second problem: a lot of people suffer discomfort from playing the damned thing. To put it bluntly, it was a Gameboy that you stuck your face into. Putting aside its limited colour palette, the hardware wasn’t powerful enough to render detailed polygonal 3D environments, nor did its hardware contain any features beyond a display and a controller to provide an immersive experience. Everything about the Virtual Boy and its marketing suggested that this was supposed to be a publicly available virtual reality experience, and that simply wasn’t the case. The most obvious problem was player expectations. The Virtual Boy ended up hurting itself out of the gate. This may sound like a troublesome display to play games on, but really, the image is sharp and the 3D is convincing. Each neoprene eyepiece also presents a slightly different image that gives the impression of true 3D depth. The images were produced by shining a single vertical line of LEDs into oscillating mirrors that drew the image on screen.
A full colour display was supposedly an option, but would have made the system significantly more expensive. The system’s display was monochromatic red and black, giving its games a unique appearance, if nothing else. The colour scheme was more than an aesthetic choice. Rather than actually wearing the display using a head-mounted harness, as one would expect, the unit sits on a pair of stilts and is intended to be set onto a desk or table and then looked into. It was a headset of red and black, looking strikingly like of virtual reality unit from contemporary sci-fi. In its final form, the Virtual Boy was certainly something to capture the attention of 90’s youth. With the N64 struggling with delays, they allegedly rushed his new device out to market in an attempt to fill the void. Yokoi was toying around with ideas for his new device when the higher ups caught wind of it. He was also the mentor of Mario creator, Shigeru Miyamoto, so this guy knew his stuff. The Virtual Boy certainly had a worthy pedigree: Its development was lead by Gunpei Yokoi, one of Nintendo’s big brains in the early days, and the designer of the Game & Watch and the Gameboy. It was the Virtual Boy and it failed legendarily. While the Nintendo 64 was still pre-drinking, preparing itself to stagger out of the gate and join the party, Nintendo rushed another console out in the interim. It happened during that forgotten transitional period between Donkey Kong Country and Super Mario 64, when developers were trying to work out 3D gameplay to justify all those extra bits that their wiz-bang new consoles were supposedly pushing. Nintendo had successfully revitalized the market after the video game crash of ’83 with the NES, and now it was time to get into some serious competition, and a lot of players were stepping up to bat.īut perhaps the strangest, most bizarre contraption actually came from Nintendo itself. I’m talking about forgotten monstrosities such as the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer, the Atari Jaguar, and the Phillips CD-i.
That’s a simple way to remember the 90’s console market, but when you dig into it, you realize that there were a lot more disfigured abominations in between. Most people in the west choose to remember the Sega Genesis’ battle with the Super Nintendo, then later the Sony Playstation vs. The 90’s were a weird time for video games, when you actually go back and think about it.