Super power.īen Gilbert: In 1995 Nintendo was seen as the biggest game company in the world, the Super Nintendo, as well as the previous console, Nintendo Entertainment System, and the Nintendo Game Boy, were all completely dominating at the time.Īd: You've gotta play it, you've gotta have it, you've got a reputation. So, what happened?Īd: Now you're playing with power. Less than a year later, it was discontinued, and it remains the worst selling console in the history of the company. Graham Flanagan: Remember Nintendo's Virtual Boy? Probably not.įlanagan: Nintendo released it in August of 1995. Following is a transcript of the video.Īd: Virtual Boy, a 3-D game for a 3-D world! To learn pretty much everything there is to know about the history of the Virtual Boy, we highly recommend visiting the Planet Virtual Boy website, where you'll find an exhaustive, comprehensive library of almost everything ever written or researched about the Virtual Boy. We got our hands on a vintage Virtual Boy at the retro video games store VideoGamesNewYork in Manhattan's East Village to get a better idea of why the system stumbled out of the gate, existing as a bizarre blemish on Nintendo's otherwise impressive record. With around 770,000 units sold, it remains Nintendo's worst-selling console of all time. Unfortunately, the Virtual Boy didn't click with customers, and it was discontinued less than a year after its debut. It offered gamers a 3D experience they couldn't get on TV screens or handheld devices. That year, the company released the Virtual Boy console, which didn't technically count as virtual reality. In 1995, Nintendo tried to cash in on the virtual reality craze. The new Steven Spielberg movie "Ready Player One" imagines a not-too-distant future where the population spends a majority of its waking hours inside a virtual reality system known as "The Oasis." The movie is set in 2045, so if real-world technology wants to catch up with the story's premise, we'd better hurry up. Here are some pages from the manual, for your enjoyment.Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. Warnings are the serious ones, indicating that you may severely injure yourself. Cautions are the lesser evil and they indicate that you may damage the console, or yourself. One is called "warning", and the other "caution". They even went as far as creating two types of warnings. Almost every section has warnings of some kind "don't play it in the car", "if you use pirated games, you'll get nauseous", "wear your prescription eyeglasses", "don't make it too loud". Pages and pages have so much red warning text it feels like you're playing the console. The Virtual Boy manual clearly reveals that they knew they messed up. What I liked though is that Nintendo knew very well they had walked all over ergonomics when they released it. Hooking up and playing my Virtual Boy for the first time was a good experience, and all rumours of headaches and discomfort I had heard previously were true. Sure, it was a thundering failure, but innovators deserve some credit regardless of the commercial outcome. The Virtual Boy was a brave attempt by Nintendo to bring virtual reality gaming into homes.
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