Nintendo Virtual Boy

The Virtual Boy went on sale in Japan on 21 July 1995 and in North America on 14 August 1995 at US$179.95. It was built by Nintendo's R&D1 division under Gunpei Yokoi, the designer behind the Game & Watch and the Game Boy — a man whose stated philosophy was "lateral thinking with withered technology," using cheap, mature parts in ways nobody expected. Shigeru Miyamoto had minimal involvement.

The part everyone gets wrong is the shape of it. Despite the visor and the eyeshade, it was never a headset — you didn't wear it. Nintendo built it as a stationary, steel-shielded tabletop unit that stood on a folding stand, and the manual assumed you were seated at a table, leaning into a neoprene eyeshade. The display wasn't a screen in the usual sense either: it used red LEDs scanned across oscillating mirrors, 384×224 in four shades of red on black. Not an LCD, not backlit, and not colour — the owner's memory of being disappointed that it wasn't in colour is exactly right, and it was a deliberate choice, not a defect.

Nintendo was worried about the discomfort before anyone had bought one, and built the warning into the software: every cartridge carried a yes/no option to pause the machine automatically every 15 to 30 minutes so you would take a break. The design had been shaped by concerns about motion sickness and about lazy-eye conditions in young children, and several prominent scientists concluded the long-term side effects could be more serious than that. The worry was not misplaced — reviewing it for The Washington Post, Bill Frischling reported dizziness, nausea and headaches.

It collapsed fast. Only 22 games were ever released, led by the pack-in Mario's Tennis and later Virtual Boy Wario Land. Nintendo pulled it in Japan on 22 December 1995 — barely five months on sale — and in North America in August 1996. By the middle of that year Blockbuster was clearing its units at $50 apiece. In June 1996 Nintendo reported worldwide sales of 770,000 to Famitsu, 140,000 of them in Japan; by comparison, the Wii U, Nintendo's next-worst performer, sold 13.6 million. The console does not appear on Nintendo's official hardware sales page at all.

Yokoi left Nintendo on 15 August 1996, after thirty-one years. The tidy story is that the Virtual Boy ended him, and it is not that simple: Nintendo has denied the flop had anything to do with his departure, calling the timing "absolutely coincidental," and Yokoi had planned for years to retire at fifty. He went on to found Koto Laboratory and to lead development of Bandai's WonderSwan before dying in a traffic accident on 4 October 1997.