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

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.

Dabbling in virtual reality?

A 1995 Japanese ad for the Nintendo Virtual Boy.

Credit: Nintendo

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.

However, VR was neither presented nor perceived in the same way in Japan as it was in the United States. First, while VR research in the United States was largely developed and driven by military interests, in Japan, it came out of a telecommunications context. Second, in the mid-1990s at least, Japanese VR research had an engineering emphasis rather than computer science like in the United States. Thus, the Japanese public’s perception of VR was shaped by the additional availability, via public demonstrations for example, of VR devices and experiences different from those shown elsewhere. These devices and experiences were characterized in the United States as “cool gadgets” and “strange experiments” but would, perhaps taken together, provide alternative highlights of VR’s potential as a medium.

You're reading an excerpt of Seeing Red: Nintendo's Virtual Boy by Jose Zagal and Benj Edwards.

Credit: MIT Press

Prior to the release of the Virtual Boy, Nintendo designers and engineers expressed at least some interest in virtual reality. For example, when interviewed by Satoru Iwata about the development of the Nintendo’s autostereoscopic handheld Nintendo 3DS, Shigeru Miyamoto commented, “To start at the beginning, at the time [just before the creation of the Virtual Boy], I was interested in virtual reality, and was one of the staff that went on and on about how we should do something with 3D goggles. I didn’t exactly twist his arm, but I would talk with Yokoi-san about how [3D] goggles would be interesting.”

However, not much is known outside of Nintendo if this interest led to in-house experiments or the development of prototype virtual reality systems. Some reports, mostly secondhand, do exist that there was some research taking place. For example, while researching an article about the Virtual Boy for FastCompany, Benj Edwards interviewed Takefumi Makino, the biographer of Gunpei Yokoi and a friend of Yokoi’s for a period near Yokoi’s death in 1997. According to Makino, Nintendo experimented with virtual reality prior to creating the Virtual Boy, but it found the experience unsatisfactory.

Specifically, Makino describes that Nintendo thought that VR was too “realistic” to translate well to Nintendo’s fantastic style of games that involved mushrooms, goombas, and high-jumping plumbers. He said:

At the time, Virtual Reality had become a worldwide boom. Mr. Yokoi, then, began looking for ways to use VR in games. However, the conclusion was that VR was not suitable for Nintendo video games. This was because Nintendo’s games created an “unrealistic world” on the screen, giving users a variety of experiences within that world (in a “realistic world” there isn’t anybody who can jump as high as Mario, or mushrooms that make you bigger, right?). VR, for its part, was seen as creating a “realistic world” in a virtual space and giving users simulated experiences within that space. Mr. Yokoi’s conclusion was that VR should be used in utilitarian products and was not suited for games.

It’s unclear in the quote above whether Yokoi was referring to what he had seen or experienced in the VR industry at large at the time or if he was referring to his knowledge of prototypes and technology developed either internally or at companies partnered with Nintendo.

Internally, for instance, Nintendo had earlier developed LCD shutter glasses as an accessory for its Family Computer Console. Was this device abandoned internally, or were there attempts at further development by attempting to pair it with head-tracking technology?

Externally, Nintendo had a close relationship at the time with Argonaut Software (later Argonaut Games), which had created, and helped further develop, the Super FX chip for Nintendo’s SNES platform. This chip, included in select game cartridges, was a graphical accelerator that allowed for real-time 3D polygonal graphics that were otherwise not technically possible on the SNES. Argonaut’s approach was technically innovative at the time and led to Nintendo reportedly being interested in pursuing another hardware project with Argonaut.

In a 2019 interview with NintendoLife, Jez San, Argonaut’s founder, described how the Argonaut/Nintendo joint venture company A/N Software began working on the development of a “VR Machine” called the “Super Visor.”

“We designed a very cool 3D graphics chip for it,” San explains. “We started researching motion tracking and had a system that worked. Nintendo had introduced us to Texas Instruments, who had this novel concept of what, at the time, was called the DMD—Digital Mirror Display—but has since become DLP, which stands for Digital Light Processing. Instead of using liquid crystal pixels, the chip had little mirrors, and the angle of mirrors can be altered. The chip had the full image on it; it was like half an inch big, and it had a full 320 by 200 pixels on it. You shined lights on it—like red, green and blue lights—and you waggled the mirrors in software, and you’d get a display. We were going to use this display for the VR headset, and they had just invented this technology. It wasn’t publicly known, so we were non-disclosed by Texas Instruments, and it would have been very cool.”

Nintendo reportedly invested $1 million on the device, which also included motion tracking, before deciding to pull the plug. However, unlike other unreleased devices from that time (e.g., Sega’s unreleased VR headset), there is no physical or documentary evidence to date for the “Super Visor” (e.g., prototypes, photographs, or videos) or, perhaps more importantly, evidence demonstrating how close the device was to being a commercially viable product.

A screenshot of Wario Land on the Virtual Boy.

Benj Edwards

A screenshot of Wario Land on the Virtual Boy. Benj Edwards

A screenshot of Red Alarm on the Virtual Boy.

Benj Edwards

A screenshot of Red Alarm on the Virtual Boy. Benj Edwards

A screenshot of Galactic Pinball on the Virtual Boy.

Benj Edwards

A screenshot of Galactic Pinball on the Virtual Boy. Benj Edwards

A screenshot of Red Alarm on the Virtual Boy. Benj Edwards

A screenshot of Galactic Pinball on the Virtual Boy. Benj Edwards

A screenshot of Golf on the Virtual Boy.

Benj Edwards

A screenshot of Space Squash on the Virtual Boy.

Benj Edwards

A screenshot of Innsmouth No Yakata on the Virtual Boy.

Benj Edwards

A screenshot of Jack Bros. on the Virtual Boy.

Benj Edwards

A screenshot of Nester's Funky Bowling on the Virtual Boy.

Benj Edwards

According to San, the project was canceled because Gunpei Yokoi preferred another display for use in a new Nintendo device—the display that would ultimately appear in the Virtual Boy. The timing is unclear, however. Jez San’s comments suggest that Nintendo was simultaneously working on two “VR” devices: the Super Visor and what would become the Virtual Boy.

Did the Virtual Boy’s development begin prior to or after work began on the Super Visor? Was it the case that different groups were working on a Nintendo VR device unaware of each other, only for the Super Visor to be canceled due to Yokoi winning an internal political struggle? Perhaps the Super Visor was canceled simply because the Virtual Boy was further along in development such that there was clarity regarding its final cost and its possibility of shipping at a date that was convenient for Nintendo (i.e., as soon as possible, to maintain interest before the Nintendo 64 (N64) shipped)?

Hiroshi Yamauchi, Nintendo’s president at the time, was known to encourage teams within Nintendo to compete against each other. Famously, Nintendo’s research and development was initially handled by three (later four) competing divisions called Nintendo R&D1, Nintendo R&D2, and Nintendo R&D3. Thus, it is plausible that Nintendo had two “VR” projects running simultaneously.

Regardless of the murkiness in this matter, a key technology that sparked Nintendo’s Virtual Boy development was not made via Argonaut but rather through a US company that was not a part of the video game industry.

The scanned linear array

A photo of the Virtual Boy's scanned linear array display, removed from a prototype console.

Credit: Courtesy Ben Wells

The development of the Virtual Boy’s hardware began with the creation of a high-resolution portable display called the scanned linear array (SLA), invented by Reflection Technology of Waltham, Massachusetts in 1986 and patented soon after. The SLA used a one-dimensional vertical column of LEDs and a rapidly oscillating mirror to create the illusion of a two-dimensional rectangular display. This is the key piece of technology that made the Virtual Boy possible.

Reflection Technology founder Allen Becker invented the SLA because he wanted to create a small, high-contrast heads-up display for use with a portable computer. After several years of development, Becker and his team of engineers integrated the SLA technology into a commercial product called the Private Eye that was prototyped by late 1988 and ready for shipping in April 1990. The Private Eye was essentially a tiny computer monitor that the user positioned over one eye for a private, heads-up computer display that could serve as a portable replacement for a desktop cathode ray tube (CRT) monitor or portable LCD on a conventional IBM PC compatible of the time. The Private Eye could simulate the view of a 12-inch display seen 18 inches away, but it had a catch: it could only display shades of red.

Allen Becker, the inventor of the Virtual Boy's red LED display, at his desk at Reflection Technology.

Credit: Courtesy Mary Swartz

The SLA used red LEDs because Becker discovered a source of single-line LED assemblies used in the large-format drum printer industry. Red LEDs had been in production since 1968 and were a mature and inexpensive technology—something that, as will be discussed later, aligned well with Gunpei Yokoi’s design philosophy.

In a 2015 interview with Benj Edwards, Reflection Technology engineer Ben Wells described why the company used red LEDs:

The way a laser printer works is you have a sheet of semiconductor material. It’s usually a drum, and the laser—if you could see with my hand—I’m shining a light back and forth on the drum. You slowly rotate the drum, and the laser traces out the image. The toner sticks to [the drum], and all you need is something that will cause the static charge on the drum to dissipate, and it turns out red light is the trick.

That’s why there were red LEDs. If the world had invented blue LEDs before red, then it would have been blue instead."

While today it might be possible to construct a full-color LED display similar to the Private Eye using red, green, and blue LEDs, it wasn’t practical in the 1980s or early 1990s. Inexpensive, reliable, high-powered blue LEDs weren’t commercially available until later in the 1990s—too late for the Virtual Boy. According to Ben Wells, Reflection Technology never developed a color version of the Private Eye display.

Selling the SLA

While seeking a wider market for its SLA display invention, Reflection put together a virtual reality video game demo circa 1990 using two Private Eye displays, one for each eye, that were mounted to a welder’s mask. It added head-tracking and linked it to a portable PC that ran a first-person tank game it either developed in-house or licensed from others—Reflection staff’s memories were unclear on this point during interviews. The tank game displayed a first-person view from a tank window and allowed the player to shoot other tanks.

Brochure for the Reflection Technology Private Eye, which was a small heads-up display that used the Scanned Linear Array technology.

Credit: Reflection Technology

Reflection unsuccessfully pitched its tank-based VR demo to toy and video game companies including Mattel, Hasbro, and Sega. Sega in particular worried that the technology could cause motion sickness. In 1991, Reflection offered the display to Nintendo where it caught the attention of one of Nintendo’s top inventors, Gunpei Yokoi.

Gunpei Yokoi was hired by Nintendo in 1965 as a newly graduated electronics engineer. In a few years, thanks to his success with various toy and puzzle inventions, he was assigned as the general manager of Nintendo’s first electronics development team. This team would later grow and, in 1978, split into two groups: Nintendo Research & Development 1 (R&D1) and Nintendo Research & Development 2 (R&D2). Yokoi remained general manager of R&D1 and was instrumental in the Game & Watch handheld line in the early 1980s and the Game Boy portable console in 1989. In addition to his considerable skills as an engineer and inventor, it is believed that Yokoi’s success was also attributable to his personal design philosophy.

At the heart of Yokoi’s design philosophy lay a concept he called “lateral thinking with withered technology.” Yokoi’s design philosophy can be summarized as an approach that emphasized finding novel uses for existing, inexpensive technology. His philosophy arguably runs counter to conventional game industry wisdom where newer, flashier, cutting-edge technology is (assumed) better. The philosophy led to the success of the Game & Watch and Game Boy platforms.

For Yokoi, an older technology’s limitations were an opportunity—both commercially (older tech is cheaper and generally more reliable due to manufacturing experience) and creatively (reimagining its use provides opportunities for new and unexpected kinds of consumer entertainment experiences). So how did this philosophy play out when Yokoi was presented with Reflection Technology’s Private Eye display?

On the commercial side of things, the limitations inherent in the red-only display (and its potential low-power nature) caught Yokoi’s imagination because it utilized inexpensive, power-sipping red LED technology. A device using this display could be manufactured and sold more cheaply and would also be more energy-efficient to play; it would either use fewer batteries or play longer with the ones it had.

The Private Eye’s display was creatively interesting to Yokoi because, as demonstrated by Reflection’s demo, it could simulate absolute blackness in the areas where the LEDs didn’t light. This provided an immersive sense of depth that Yokoi particularly enjoyed. Makino explains:

What particularly intrigued Mr. Yokoi was the way in which the background was black. Because liquid crystal displays have a backlight, the background doesn’t become black. However, Private Eye used an LED display, which meant that the non-illuminated parts became completely black.

Mr. Yokoi wanted to use this “complete blackness” to allow users to experience a “limitless space.” He had this thought: “How can you jump outside of the screen?” In the end, you see, games were just drawing pseudo-three-dimensional images on a screen [that simulated depth]. At some point, users were going to get tired of this, and so he wanted to create games that could really jump out of the screen. He had already made several games that interacted between the screen and the outside world, like Duck Hunt and R.O.B. (the Nintendo robot).

Mr. Yokoi had this idea that if the background was completely dark, then the screen would feel as if it stretched out in depth, indefinitely. In my interview with him as well, he talked about “extending the depth of the screen”; that was his idea, and to render it, using a 3D display was necessary.

Yokoi saw the unlimited, enveloping blackness of the Private Eye’s LED-based display as an opportunity to create games without borders, hoping for a new kind of gameplay not constrained by the limitations of a TV screen. As noted earlier with regard to Japanese perceptions of VR, blocking out the outside world was a feature rather than a drawback.

For Yokoi, this was also a chance to broaden the audience for games. Yokoi believed that the population of people playing games was decreasing—with players less interested in having to spend a lot of money for new games that were also more difficult to play. The Virtual Boy was to be “geared toward people at the bottom of the game [pyramid]”; it was “aimed at aunts, uncles, and children.”

Gunpei Yokoi felt that TV-based games had reached their limits and saw stereoscopic 3D as a logical next step to take video games into a new era of design. To help secure this new era, for these new kinds of games, Nintendo obtained an exclusive license to gaming applications of the SLA and also purchased a minority stake in Reflection Technology.

Developing the Virtual Boy

At first, Yokoi intended to create a head-mounted virtual reality game console with the SLA display technology, codenamed “VR32.” He envisioned a third category of video games for Nintendo—beyond consoles and handhelds—called “wearables,” where a player could strap the new console to their head and play on the go. The journey from “wearable” to what the Virtual Boy eventually became (a tabletop unit on a stand) largely involved worry about liability issues at Nintendo—specifically, there were concerns with the Japanese Product Liability (PL) Law that was being discussed—before ultimately going into effect in 1995.

To balance the needs of running a CPU on battery power while also providing a modern gaming experience, the engineering team picked a relatively low-wattage 32-bit processor from NEC called the V810. NEC designed the V810 in the early 1990s for embedded applications. During this phase of development, when Yokoi still intended the console to be a wearable headset, Nintendo’s engineers also developed custom chips for graphics and sound and incorporated the V810 into its own custom IC package. As fitting for an intended wearable, sound was provided via a standard headphone jack or through two speakers (on the left and right of the unit). However, liability and safety concerns would significantly alter the development trajectory of the VR32.

In the early 1990s, there was less knowledge and understanding of the potentially negative effects of electromagnetic fields (EMFs) on the brain. These concerns would only begin to be significantly explored and addressed in the coming years as mobile/cellular telephones became increasingly popular and widely available. Since the VR32 headset prototype placed the main circuitry of the console on the wearer’s head, according to Takefume Makino, there were concerns in Nintendo that it might be found liable if someone got sick from EMF exposure. To address these concerns, Nintendo added metal shielding to the VR32 to block EMFs. In doing so, Makino claims that the added weight from the shielding made the headset too heavy to comfortably wear on the head with a strap like a pair of goggles.

To compensate for the extra weight, Nintendo designed a special shoulder mount that allowed the player to wear the VR32 on their head while distributing weight to the neck and shoulders. Yokoi mentioned plans for making the shoulder mount available for sale commercially in a press interview with Next Generation magazine, and Nintendo also patented it in Japan.

Again, liability concerns popped up. Nintendo feared injuries from someone wearing the console while accidentally walking down the stairs or from playing it in the back seat of a car. The mental picture, and resulting PR nightmare, of someone having the VR32 smash into their face from hitting the back of a car seat during a car accident or sudden stop, was enough to warrant further changes to the device. In the end, the shoulder mount was not commercially released, and it might not even have been necessary since the Virtual Boy did not, in fact, ship with any added metal shielding.

However, all these (well-placed) fears resulted in the VR32 becoming a tabletop unit on a stand. The stand solved several problems: It held the weight of the console and kept users from being mobile (a concern due to mobile injury worries). The VR32 design was thus a severe compromise that betrayed several of Yokoi’s original intentions—wearability and mobility— which in turn made head tracking also unviable. The only two major design conceits that remained from the original vision were its semi-portable nature and its stereoscopic display.

Now that it was stationary, the VR32 presented something of a paradox: its chips’ design had been constrained for use in a mobile device, yet it was no longer a mobile device. So why wasn’t the chipset redesigned? It seems likely that it was too late in the product development process and Nintendo was feeling pressure to release the Virtual Boy as soon as possible.

Nintendo was worried about losing market relevance (and share) by not having some kind of hardware product release. Consider that, in late 1993, the new (32-bit/64-bit) console generation had kicked off with the release of the 3DO and Atari Jaguar consoles, and 1994 would see the release of Sega’s Saturn and newcomer Sony’s PlayStation. Nintendo had nothing. It had been drip-feeding information about its “Ultra 64” (later renamed Nintendo 64) platform throughout the year while knowing it wouldn’t be ready until 1996. So, Nintendo needed a stopgap product to please shareholders. That product was the VR32—which would soon be renamed Virtual Boy.

Yokoi had doubts about the commercial viability of the VR32 in its state at the time. Makino recounts Yokoi’s feelings: “Even Mr. Yokoi admitted that he himself felt uneasy during development. He described it as a kind of ‘hiri-hiri’ feeling. This is an onomatopoeia that only exists in Japanese, but think about it as the sort of feeling you would get when being cooked slowly over a frying pan.” Despite these internal doubts, Nintendo went ahead with the Virtual Boy’s release.

Nintendo released the Virtual Boy first in Japan on July 21, 1995. Nintendo of America followed with a release in the United States on August 21, 1995, for $179.95, though it quickly lowered the price to $159.95 on October 18, 1995.

The end of the Virtual Boy

For most platforms, their discontinuation is part of a cyclical behavior in terms of sales. As a platform is released, its sales climb for a few years before reaching a peak and then declining over a longer period of years. The start of the decline usually coincides with the release of a new (and usually technologically superior) platform. Thus, the discontinuation of a video game platform is often a footnote—occurring years after the platform’s successor has been on the market.

This was not the case with the Virtual Boy.

After launch, public reception to the Virtual Boy proved tepid in Japan but initially promising in the United States. But the sales didn’t hold up, and ultimately the console only sold 140,000 units in Japan and 630,000 in North America—for a total of 770,000 estimated units sold. Nintendo pulled the plug on the Virtual Boy in Japan on December 22, 1995, just six months after launch. Due to higher sales in America, Nintendo of America continued selling the Virtual Boy in that territory into 1996. In May 1996, Nintendo offered a major price cut to the Virtual Boy to $99, but it wasn’t enough to ignite the public’s interest in the console. By late 1996 and early 1997, the Virtual Boy could regularly be found on American clearance shelves for as little as $30.

Among other factors, the Virtual Boy was unusual in being canceled extraordinarily quickly. Even other notable game platform commercial failures had longer lifecycles (e.g., Sega’s Dreamcast launched in late 1998 and was discontinued in March 2001, and Nintendo’s own Wii U platform had a little more than five years on the market). There has been speculation about why the Virtual Boy was canceled so quickly. The most credible arguments contend that two things contributed to Nintendo’s decision: a lack of potential games that could turn sales around for the device and the crisis surrounding the as-yet-unreleased Nintendo 64.

Box art for Virtual Boy Wario Land.

Nintendo

Box art for Virtual Boy Wario Land. Nintendo

Box art for Red Alarm on the Virtual Boy.

Nintendo

Box art for Red Alarm on the Virtual Boy. Nintendo

Box art for Virtual Boy Wario Land. Nintendo

Box art for Red Alarm on the Virtual Boy. Nintendo

Box art for Teleroboxer on the Virtual Boy.

Nintendo

Box art for Teleroboxer on the Virtual Boy. Nintendo

Box art for Galactic Pinball on the Virtual Boy.

Nintendo

Box art for Galactic Pinball on the Virtual Boy. Nintendo

Box art for Teleroboxer on the Virtual Boy. Nintendo

Box art for Galactic Pinball on the Virtual Boy. Nintendo

Nintendo’s restrictive practices in bringing third-party developers on board to develop games meant that there was a dearth of forthcoming game titles that could strengthen the platform; the release calendar was not well populated. Furthermore, the Virtual Boy’s lukewarm reception meant that there were no new developers eager to sign on with new Virtual Boy titles. In other words, the Virtual Boy was not a platform for which there was either a significant number of titles in development or interest in developing new ones. The second argument explaining Nintendo’s rapid cancellation was the sense of a crisis for Nintendo that was reaching a boil, with concerns that the company might even withdraw from the game market.

This crisis was felt keenly by Yokoi as well, exceptionally so when Sony’s PlayStation launched in 1994: “the newcomer Nintendo 64 was no match for it.” By mid-1996, Nintendo was significantly behind schedule with the release of its Nintendo 64 console, and the Virtual Boy had not met sales expectations. Therefore, the company should quickly shift its resources to help the Nintendo 64. In other words, it was deemed more important (for the survival of the company) to cut losses on the Virtual Boy to increase the chances of the N64 succeeding.

After a brief, interesting lifespan, the star of the Virtual Boy burned out. In August 1996, Gunpei Yokoi resigned from Nintendo, ending his long and influential run at the company. His influence on Nintendo lived on, however; the firm continued to develop products using “lateral thinking with withered technology”—the Nintendo DS and Wii are perhaps two standout examples. Yokoi’s philosophy is baked into Nintendo’s soul.