Nintendo 3DS, the upcoming 3-D handheld gaming device, is currently generating a huge amount of positive buzz. But 15 years ago, another bold experiment in stereoscopic 3-D gaming by Nintendo turned out to be the company's least-successful game system ever.
Nintendo released its ill-fated Virtual Boy in the United States on Aug. 14, 1995. The system, which was housed in a red visor and stood on a collapsible metal stand, was unlike any other game machine consumers had seen.
Nintendo called the Virtual Boy "portable," meaning it was self-contained and could run on batteries, but unlike other portable games, it couldn't be played on a car ride because the stand had to rest on a table. Nintendo made much of the fact that the Virtual Boy used a 32-bit processor like the recently released Sony PlayStation, but the graphics weren't what consumers associated with the phrase "32-bit." In fact, Virtual Boy's graphics were created from rows of red LEDs.
The hook was that by placing one's face into the Virtual Boy visor, each eyeball could receive a different image, thus creating the illusion of stereoscopic 3-D visuals. The design and name played on the virtual-reality machines popular in American arcades at the time. The concept of virtual reality was gaining traction in pop culture thanks to films like The Lawnmower Man (which was titled Virtual Wars in Japan).
But the experience served up by Nintendo's hardware was quite different – rather than a first-person, alternate-reality experience, most of the Virtual Boy software consisted of standard game designs with rudimentary depth-of-field effects added.
Consumers didn't understand what Virtual Boy was, and when they found out, they weren't that impressed. At $180, they didn't bite, and Nintendo discontinued the device in less than a year. Now the Virtual Boy, and some of its rare games, fetch high prices from game collectors, but the story of the strange 3-D device remains a cautionary tale about an unusual videogame technology that failed to take root.
Virtual Boy was an invention of the late Gunpei Yokoi, whose previous brainchildren had been indispensable to Nintendo's success. In the early '80s, he revolutionized game control when he invented the cross-key D-pad that would replace the joystick. He had built the Game Boy, which took portable gaming out of the realm of chintzy throwaway toys and turned it into a business that eventually eclipsed Nintendo's home consoles. As a game producer, Yokoi spearheaded the development of titles like Metroid and Super Mario Land, games that often had a quirky, somewhat un-Nintendo-like flavor.
Even today, Nintendo creates all sorts of weird game hardware that rarely sees the light of day, let alone comes to market. In a parallel universe, Virtual Boy might have been one of those abandoned experiments – a clever application of technology, but not something that people would actually want to buy. But for reasons unknown, Nintendo released Virtual Boy in the summer of 1995.
Perhaps the company felt it could do no wrong. The Nintendo of 1995 was still quite high off its own stash. Sega and NEC had mounted a challenge with 16-bit systems, but the Super Nintendo had overtaken them. The Nintendo 64 had a lot of buzz and the Sony PlayStation wasn't quite flying off shelves yet – to say nothing of the stalled-out Sega Saturn.
But Game Boy was getting a bit long in the tooth, and what better way to engage consumers than with a product that capitalized on the virtual-reality trend? On some level, there seemed to be a belief that this was the inevitable endpoint of videogame progress – a 3-D world that you experienced through a head-mounted visor. Virtual Boy didn't actually do that, but it sure looked the part.
Nintendo took the veil off Virtual Boy at its Shoshinkai trade show at the end of 1994, and reaction from the press was swift and furious. Prominent game critic and historian Steven Kent called it the "Virtual Dog," and that was a succinct summation of the tenor of the press coverage.
If you want an even more damning example, try this on for size: At 15, I didn't even want one. I already owned a Nintendo, a Super Nintendo, a Game Boy and a Game Boy Pocket. I even had a lifetime subscription to Nintendo Power. But when Virtual Boy launched in August at $180, I was quite sure I didn't want to bother. I'd played it a few times; Nintendo set up display units on the countertops of just about every electronics store in my admittedly limited travel radius, and I'd played the launch games.
And, you know, it was pretty cool. We were all still playing Game Boys – with their monochromatic, greenish puke screens – so it's not like the Virtual Boy's crimson glare posed a huge mental hurdle. You'd play the packed-in game Mario's Tennis and the ball would zoom up toward your face, then zoom out into the distance. It was unique. But in the end, you were still playing videogame tennis, which was kind of old and boring by then and wouldn't come back into vogue until 2006.
[Top image: kythreotisg/Flickr, bottom image: barite/Flickr]
It didn't help that the rest of the launch games kind of sucked. Red Alarm was a shooter like Star Fox, except not worthy to even be mentioned in the same sentence as that game. Teleroboxer was a first-person boxing game that was too insanely difficult for its own good. And Galactic Pinball – really? The takeaway was clear: Nintendo hadn't quite figured out how to use the Virtual Boy's solitary unique feature to deliver a killer app.
And it never did. The best game ever for the hardware was Virtual Boy Wario Land, a lengthy, addictive 2-D platform game that barely had any 3-D functionality in it. Mario Clash took the original Mario Bros. and added a plane in the background, letting the character throw turtle shells forward and backwards, not just left and right, giving the Virtual Boy another decent game.
It was tough to get the word out about these games, though. Nintendo faced a serious marketing problem with Virtual Boy. Due to the nature of the graphics, it was difficult to actually show screenshots in print magazines, which in 1995 was the primary way the vast majority of game enthusiasts learned about new products. Game trailers on television didn't convey the experience well. Quite frankly, in the context of a magazine or TV spot, the red-LED graphics looked just plain bad.
But this wasn't the only problem. When you play a videogame on a screen, people can gather around and watch you play, often making them want to try it themselves. In sharp contrast, when you look at a Virtual Boy player, all you see is the back of their head.
It's the opposite dynamic from the one at play in the Wii, the game console with the revolutionary motion controller Nintendo released in 2006. With the Wii, Nintendo deliberately went with a concept that would make people gather around the television and want to try the games. It's a success story that's being copied by the other industry players with their upcoming motion-control devices (Sony with PlayStation Move and Microsoft with the Kinect for Xbox 360).
Realizing these challenges, Nintendo built its strategy for marketing the Virtual Boy around getting as many people as possible to try the hardware. Hence all those demo units. Nintendo also pushed to get the Virtual Boy and its entire game library into rental stores, specifically Blockbuster Video.
None of this worked. Virtual Boy tanked – consumers didn't want it, retailers didn't want to stock it, and nobody wanted to try to fix it. In fact, the one thing that Nintendo actually did right during this whole debacle was to adopt a scorched-earth policy, throwing the whole sordid affair down the memory hole. In Japan, the Virtual Boy didn't even last a year – the final games were released Dec. 22, 1995. In the United States, where the wheels of retail turn a bit more slowly, the moribund console held on a little longer, with the final game, 3D Tetris, released March 22, 1996.
By the spring of 1996, Virtual Boy units and games were being blown out at rock-bottom prices. Blockbuster divested itself of its massive supply of rental units, and many game collectors got their Virtual Boys there for about $30 (in hard plastic carrying cases that now sell for $100 each at auction). Blockbuster sold games for $10 or less. In the end, Nintendo only moved about 770,000 Virtual Boys worldwide before pulling the plug.
To fill the remaining demand for Virtual Boy software – after all, failure or not, a few hundred thousand people owned these things and wanted to play games on them – specialty retailer Electronics Boutique sold imported titles from Japan. This is why many Japan-only games like Virtual Fishing and V-Tetris can be found in U.S. gamers' collections.
The arrested lifespan of the Virtual Boy left many canceled games in various states of completion. Rare was developing a companion game for its upcoming Goldeneye 007 shooter for the Nintendo 64. Nintendo had a trio of games that were shown at trade shows and looked nearly finished; of these, a fully playable version of an action game called Bound High was recently recompiled from its source code and released onto the internet.
Like other game-system curiosities that were once unwanted overstock, Virtual Boy has slowly but steadily become a high-priced collector's item. Most prized are the games released in limited quantities at the end of the console's abbreviated life. In the United States, Jack Bros. sells for more than $150 in complete condition, but recently some other late-release games have crept up in price, including 3-D Tetris, Nester's Funky Bowling and Waterworld. (Yes – there was a videogame version of this horrendous flop of a movie.)
In Japan, most Virtual Boy games are relatively easy to get a hold of save for a trio of titles that shipped in severely limited quantities right as the whole operation was collapsing: Virtual Lab, SD Gundam Dimension War and the rarest Virtual Boy game in the world, Virtual Bowling. These easily fetch upward of $500 each.
It's hard not to like the Virtual Boy, in the same way that your heart goes out to a puppy with three legs. It wasn't worth $180 in 1995 dollars and for most people it probably isn't worth that now. Quite frankly it shouldn't have been released at any price. But as a ballsy, out-of-the-box experiment in breaking free of the established paradigms of how people play videogames, it demands a certain amount of admiration. Even if it turned out to be one of the biggest flops in gaming history.
[Image: jasohill/Flickr]
See Also:
