Nearly 30 years after the launch of the Virtual Boy, not much is publicly known about how, exactly, Nintendo came to be interested in developing what

Virtual Boy: The bizarre rise and quick fall of Nintendo’s enigmatic red console

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2024-05-15 11:30:09

Nearly 30 years after the launch of the Virtual Boy, not much is publicly known about how, exactly, Nintendo came to be interested in developing what would ultimately become its ill-fated console. Was Nintendo committed to VR as a future for 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 possibly risky, opportunity that presented itself? The answer is probably a little bit of both.

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

The late 1980s and 1990s were a heady time for virtual reality, and, when it came to generating public interest, Japan was arguably leading the charge. In May 1991, Hattori Katsura’s Jinkō genjitsukan no sekai (The world of the feeling of artificial reality) was published. It was the first best-selling general audience book on VR, beating Howard Rheingold’s watershed Virtual Reality by a few months. Japan is also “where VR was first repackaged as a consumer technology” and, by 1991, it had more VR systems than anywhere else in the world.