Virtual Boy: The bizarre rise and quick fall of Nintendo’s enigmatic red console
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I remember looking at the virtual boy over Christmas of 95 and it was kind of cool idea but ended up spending my Christmas money on a PlayStation.
The reason why was the PlayStation had games with more than one player and even if it was one player only game you could still share the experience by watching it on the tv.
Virtual boy seemed kind of isolated.
Even the Mets VR headset we have now rarely gets used.
VR is one of those things that sounds great in theory but isn’t as practical.
The reason why was the PlayStation had games with more than one player and even if it was one player only game you could still share the experience by watching it on the tv.
Virtual boy seemed kind of isolated.
Even the Mets VR headset we have now rarely gets used.
VR is one of those things that sounds great in theory but isn’t as practical.
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Amazing, first the price plummeted and then it skyrocketed. If I didn't have one, I definitely wouldn't pay that much for one. Mine's sitting on top of a wooden 5.25" floppy box.
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macosandlinux
Ars Scholae Palatinae
Nostalgia is a powerful thing, plus it's a unique looking piece of retro gaming tech that invites discussion or just looks damn cool in a YouTuber's backdrop setting. I see you also still got a bunch of games!Amazing, first the price plummeted and then it skyrocketed. If I didn't have one, I definitely wouldn't pay that much for one. Mine's sitting on top of a wooden 5.25" floppy box.
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What can I say? At some point I saw a pile of them for $5 at a garage sale, though the set I got when the system went on that deep sale was about four.
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Normally I don't trust blindfolds, but that seems pretty effective.
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This was a great writeup and a trip down memory lane. I spent countless hours playing Pinball and Wario as a kid. Wario was my favorite, it was a really fun game, despite the limitations of the Virtual Boy hardware.
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When I worked at Babbage's as a store manager, I got one of these systems for free from Nintendo. I gave it to one of my employees who really wanted one. I wish I had kept it to go in my collection with my Vectrex, Colecovision, Turbo-GrafX, and Jaguar.
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What exactly are you two on about? I made no reference to 'history' in my comment.
Just that most of the first page is hemming and hawing and qualifiers about answers the author couldn't get. I think my favorite line is "Some reports, mostly secondhand, do exist that there was some research taking place."
Even in context it's utterly meaningless. It reads like a 7th grader trying to meet a word count.
Edit: (And feels nice to be called "young", but I'm sad to inform you I still have a couple copies of Nintendo Power on my bookshelf. Rescued from my teenage bedroom when my parents finally moved.)
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I also was a little confused about this. Your complaint seems to be that the author too often relies upon speculation even where it might have been possible through research to obtain a definite answer. I didn't notice any commentary either way about the period of the story.
On that I think I agree; it's not necessarily bad for a single book just to collect and repeat, but it makes the audience more likely to be people like me who know very little about the Virtual Boy than the big Nintendo fans who probably already know a lot.
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Which is exactly the impression I got about the article too, and thing is, I don't see that as a problem.
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At some point, just give up and don't publish. I'm not going to assert this was poorly researched, because I don't know what research he did -- merely that what he found wasn't enough for what he appears to have wanted to write.
Maybe an article full of "it is plausible that ...", "the timing is unclear...", "there is no physical or documentary evidence to date for...", and "it’s unclear in the quote above whether Yokoi was referring to..." (without an accompanying 'however' explaining why not knowing what the quoted speaker was referring to isn't crippling to our understanding the quote) works for y'all, but I find it simply bizarre. Again, my favorite: "Some reports, mostly secondhand, do exist that there was some research taking place." Shit, you don't say!
A few good lines do cut through the morass of unknowns, like "Regardless of the murkiness in this matter, a key technology that sparked Nintendo’s Virtual Boy development was..." But why precede that with a paragraph consisting of nothing but questions you don't even try to answer? Are you asking the readers to provide answers? If you don't have the answers, and the answers aren't even necessary, then just cut the damn questions.
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This is disingenuous at best. What little WAS gleaned still lets us know some things, even if they're vaguer and not as concrete as we might like, some conclusions can be drawn. Further, you didn't bother quoting the rest. The article isn't a "morass of unknowns". It's some solid information and admission that we don't have a lot of clear information beyond that but we do have SOME ideas. History is a tough thing to crack, and a lot of the time all we have are vaguer things to draw conclusions from. All these vague second hand accounts can be brought together to draw more specific conclusions though.
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I will say that, like bigjoec, I found the number of vague, noncommital statements early in the article, when it's supposed to be a history of a product, to be frustrating. The article does get a lot more definitive as it goes on, most notably once it starts talking about the scanned linear array (SLA), invented by Reflection Technology.
Ironically, that seems to be where the 2015 Fast Company article by co-author Benj Edwards starts, and covers more extensively:
Maybe you want to include that vague, speculative stuff in the full book, but starting off this article with it made it seem weak and not really informative. But even looking at the book, it's hard to see if the authors did more than just compile from existing articles and materials. It's not clear if they took any effort to track down primary sources, interview people involved or even inquire with Nintendo directly. The closest is in the intro a mention of "support" in some way of "John Szczepaniak’s work interviewing Japanese game developers that later became his amazing The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers books." Meanwhile José P. Zagal states he started on the book in 2009, while Benj Edwards had that article in 2015, so they've both been working on Virtual Boy history for a while, but again in the into, Zagal states "my experience with this book is not one of those where the world acts against you and you succeed despite all odds. It’s mostly been a tale of procrastination, working on other things instead because they seemed more urgent or important..." so it doesn't sound like they reached out to potential sources and were stonewalled.
As a compendium of "what's known" about the Virtual Boy, it's probably a really good book. But it is frustrating to think the authors may have contented themselves with the "murkiness" of existing info a bit too often.
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I sort of glossed over that this was about promoting a book on the topic, and to that extent, such criticism is justified. I just was taking this article for what it was and didn't mind a more basic collection of facts I'd normally have had to glean from multiple elsewheres.
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It was the first post I made, quoting blue LED availability.
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That's only one falsehood though, singular.
Also, I think it was a conflating of when Blue LEDs became widely commercialized with when they became inexpensive and affordable. Some sources like Wikipedia don't make the distinction clear.
Light-emitting diode - Wikipedia
So if one isn't reading closely, one might think the 1993 innovations leading to a practical blue-LED lead to them being inexpensive practically overnight.
On the other hand, one does expect a history book to be a bit more extensively fact-checked than looking up info on Wikipedia. It also doesn't help that this error comes up in another speculative part of the text, musing why a red LED-only display was used, instead of just sticking to the quote from someone involved about why red LEDs were used.
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I said a few, as you seemed to be implying the article was riddled with "falsehoods". Also, inaccurate information and a "falsehood" are not the same thing. As shown above, that seems like an honest mistake. Heck, blue LEDs weren't showing up in a single device I purchased even as a power light until the 2000's, so they really weren't something easily cheaply available, still fitting the overall narrative that the Virtual Boy was made using intentionally "withered technology". Blue LEDs simply weren't a financially viable option, even if a company willing to use newer tech had been building something like it.
But, it's still inaccurate, so it counts as one. I'll put it up on the board.
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Thanks, you nailed this completely.
As I noted in my original post, the first page turned me off to the extent that I stopped there. Maybe I'll go back and try the rest, since as you say it gets more definitive.
As I noted in my original post, the first page turned me off to the extent that I stopped there. Maybe I'll go back and try the rest, since as you say it gets more definitive.
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If you're reading the article in paged view mode, start on page 3. The speculation continues through the bottom of page 2, but after that it's way more definitive.
Virtual Boy: The bizarre rise and quick fall of Nintendo’s enigmatic red console
How Nintendo took a gamble on a new kind of gaming experience in the '90s.
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Sorry for my slow response to this. Co-author Benj Edwards here. I dispute claims of inaccuracy or falsehoods in our work.
Publishing a chapter from an academic book like this, pulled out of context, has a few drawbacks. One of them is that yes, it wasn't initially written to be a standalone article, although I attempted to edit it more into that shape. I also had to cut a lot of text because the complete chapter was very long and the publisher requested a shorter excerpt.
Also, the book's purpose was not to go in-depth about the history of the Virtual Boy, but to examine it as a media object in line with the the MIT Press Platform Studies series. As a result, my 2015 Fast Company article does have more detail about the Virtual Boy's development than this chapter.
For simplicity and expediency sake while editing, we at Ars decided to cut the many citations and references in the chapter (possibly a mistake). Some of the claims of the piece being speculative in the comments are supported by citations in the actual book.
I have seen criticism about the mention of blue LEDs not being commercially practical until around 1994. The original text reads: "Inexpensive, reliable, high-powered blue LEDs weren’t commercially available until around 1994—slightly too late for the Virtual Boy (Lin 2014; NobelPrize .org 2014)."
The book cites two references on blue LEDs:
Of note is a quote from that first reference, "Commercialization of blue LED happened in a relatively short period of time from 1993 to 1994. After graduating from University of Tokushima, Nakamura began working at the Tokushima-based Nichia. It was during his time at Nichia that he developed blue GaN LEDs using the more cost effective doping method (low-temperature heating). Nakamura threatened his supervisors that he would resign if they did not provide him with resources to develop GaN, which is the key material to developing blue LEDs. After successfully manufacturing blue LEDs in 1994, Nichia went on to develop commercialized green LEDs the following year, and laser diodes (LD) in 1999."
It's true that blue LEDs were not in wide use until later in the 1990s or early 2000s, so for the sake of this Ars Technica article I have clarified the statement to say "Inexpensive, reliable, high-powered blue LEDs weren’t commercially available until later in the 1990s," and provide a link to the LEDinside source since the citation is not available. There may be some confusion about what "inexpensive" means here---we were contrasting with earlier low production yield, low-brightness blue LEDs that existed in limited quantities in production and in research labs before that time. As in, "Relatively inexpensive compared to previous blue LEDs." Which means they could be used as parts in mass-produced commercial products starting around 1994.
And even after all of that, the controversy is somewhat moot because the point is the same: practical Blue LEDs weren't available for use during the scanned linear array's development, and even if they were, the Virtual Boy went with red because that was the technology available from laser printer arrays that Reflection Technology drew from. The choice of "1994" in the text could have been clarified in my opinion since it seems to defy common memory---and even though I think it's technically correct (see sources above), that is something we can clarify in a second edition.
Thanks for reading the piece and taking the time to comment, and I appreciate all the positive comments about the piece too. It's an academic book, not for everyone, but we wanted to provide a novel look at the Virtual Boy and give it the respect it deserves.
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A noteworthy omission on our part that's worth pointing out. My 2015 Fast Company article does go into detail about this. I actually talked to the doctor, Eli Peli, that investigated the issue for Nintendo:
Eye Trouble
Back in the United States, Reflection continued to consult with Nintendo and Mitsumi on the Virtual Boy display. Nintendo wanted confirmation from Reflection that its technology would not harm its customers’ eyesight. Under the advice of Reflection, Nintendo hired Dr. Eli Peli of the Schepens Eye Research Institute in Boston to study the potential effects of the Virtual Boy’s display on human vision.
The Virtual Boy’s disclaimers could be a tad alarming.
Peli would not directly comment on the results of his research for this article due to a NDA with Nintendo, but Wells says that the doctor found that the technology was generally harmless for eyesight–with one caveat. Children whose optic system had not yet fully developed (which happens around ages 5-7) could develop lazy eye if the two displays were misaligned vertically. So Reflection encased the Virtual Boy’s displays into a rigid plastic case and precision steel frame. That way, there was no chance of that occurring.
“Far from being bad for your eyes,” wrote Yokoi, “The Virtual Boy was in fact pretty good for them. But we didn’t have time to properly present these findings, and so we gave up trying to include them with the product.”
The warnings on the back of this Japanese edition of Wario Land take up about a third of the space.
Despite the generally positive result, Nintendo’s legal department once again took the most cautious position and advised the inclusion of prominent warnings on the Virtual Boy’s packaging, in its manual, and on additional pamphlets included with the manual. The warnings stated that the system should not be used by kids under the age of seven.
In Japan, Virtual Boy’s warnings ended up sounding even more severe and ominous than those in the U.S. A new Japanese law, the Product Liability Act, was due to come into effect on July 1, 1995. The new law made companies responsible for any accidents caused by the use of their products. “Because of that law,” says Makino, “manuals suddenly had to mention a whole list of things that users shouldn’t do with them. Sometimes, these were quite silly: things like ‘Don’t dry a wet cat using this microwave.'” If an act was not specifically prohibited in the manual, the company would be responsible for the damage. “It was a very strict law,” he adds.
Because of this law, Nintendo decided to implement a built-in software timer into its games that would remind users every 15 minutes to pause and rest their eyes. The same reminder found its way into the manual. “The manual in effect became a list of ‘don’ts.'” wrote Yokoi. “The people who bought the product had no idea about the provisions of the PL Act, and so when they read the instructions, they got the image that this product was bad for your health.”
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The word "inexpensive" is certainly subjective, but I think in the context of where it is in the article, as a part of speculation about whether the Virtual Boy could've had a multi-color display, I think most readers' interpretations are going to be like mine, in that I assumed it was talking about "inexpensive enough to be put into a Virtual Boy for zero to little additional cost." As it was written, it made it seem to me like Nintendo had just narrowly missed the tech needed to make a full color Virtual Boy by about a year.
Even the revised line still conveys that context:
Like, to me it seems clear that the meaning of "inexpensive" is in the context of the Virtual Boy, not in comparison to whatever the obscene pricing of earlier Blue LEDs was.
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I'll note I was only adding this to "the board" as a grudging TECHNICAL thing and was essentially defending the article myself here.
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