Collection essentials #394: Virtual Boy

Here’s a game system that you’ve likely never heard of if you’re not a gamer. If you’re a Nintendo fan, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of this thing, but it’s unlikely that you’ve actually played one. It’s Nintendo’s biggest flop of all time, selling less than a million units, far more than any other system they produced.

The concept of virtual reality technology seemed enticing to many as technology rapidly developed, and Nintendo wanted to implement the concept into one of their systems. For context, the Virtual Boy came out in 1995, which was the year before Nintendo’s next major home console and well into the Game Boy’s life cycle. As you may tell from the “Boy” in the title, Virtual Boy was to be understood as a sort of portable system. But Nintendo wasn’t dropping the Game Boy upon the Virtual Boy’s release, so they were effectively planning to support three systems at once. It was smart not to halt production of the Game Boy, as the Virtual Boy had no shot at replacing it to any significant degree. It is technically portable, but playing it on the go is very impractical. 

Virtual Boy is definitely more powerful than the Game Boy, with graphics and sound that are clearly better, but it’s not as powerful as the home console Super Nintendo. The system uses 2D graphics that are entirely in red. The graphics are not in three dimensions, but it uses “stereoscopic 3D”, meaning that, looking through the two eye holes on the device, the left and right eyes are given slightly different images that the brain processes as one, creating a sort of 3D look. 

It’s not hard at all to see why the Virtual Boy failed. It seems like a neat idea on paper, but the hardware really isn’t all that well-designed. The red stereoscopic 3D graphics are infamous for being hard to look at for some people, causing nausea and headaches. Plus, surprisingly, the stand for the device is NOT adjustable at all, meaning that you have to prop it up somewhere that is just right for the device to be at the height of your eyes. 

Since the Virtual Boy was an immediate flop, it has a very small library, with only 22 games total being commercially released. However, many of those 22 games are actually pretty good! I probably would have wanted this interesting little piece of technology in my collection anyway, but the fact that it has good games is a nice bonus. But even though the games are good, they generally don’t do a lot with the stereoscopic 3D effect and don’t try much to simulate actual virtual reality, and instead they usually feel like Game Boy games that were forced into being on Virtual Boy for some reason.

I was aware of the Virtual Boy at a fairly young age, though it’s hard for me to say how I first heard about it. I’m also not really sure when was the first time I actually got to try one. The one shown in the photo I acquired back in 2018 in a trade with a fellow collector friend (who runs the YouTube channel GettingYourNerdOn). Virtual Boys were not properly designed to last a real long time without needing repairs, but fortunately I got help and my friend Adam (founder of onecircuit.com) performed a modification to the system that will help it last way longer. 

Nowadays, if there are games in the Virtual Boy library that interest you, there is a better way to play them. Nintendo later released a portable system many years later capable of stereoscopic 3D (which I’ll get to someday), and with homebrew it is possible to get Virtual Boy games to run on that system in all their stereoscopic glory, which is honestly a much better experience. Feel free to reach out to me if you want more info on that. Even though it’s not even the best way to play its own games anymore, I still think the original technology is really neat, it’s fun to show people, and it’s something I want to have in my collection.