I picked one up cheap with some birthday money. It was fun for awhile, but I never developed the emotional attachment to it that I got to other tech like my NES, SNES, or Game Boy.
The Virtual Boy flopped for a very good reason: Not only were the games ugly because they were not in color, but it was very uncomfortable to play, and there was no "spectator" aspect to the games. The games also weren't very original, nor memorable.
(I do remember trying to strap mine to my head with my belt. That lasted about 3 minutes before I gave up and got bored of the games.) Honestly, I would have enjoyed the games more on a TV with red-green glasses, like shown in the article. (When I was a kid I loved everything and anything 3d.)
Did anyone fall in love with theirs? Is anyone really nostalgic for these games? Or is this something like CED, where the lore, because it's rare, makes it interesting even though it flopped for a very good reason?
1. Nintendo is releasing Virtual Boy - Nintendo Classics in February 2026: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVvaCe4esCQ
2. Nintendo are also releasing a Virtual Boy shell compatible with the Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2 which will allow you to view the games in 3D, although I'm guessing it won't look as sharp or bright as the original. https://www.nintendo.com/en-ca/store/products/virtual-boy-fo...
I'd love to see someone take the lo-fi VR concept further with modern tech. It's proof that VR doesn't require color to be functional. There were ideas there we haven't fully explored.
The big question it opens up for me is:
- What happens if we ditch color and focus on clarity?
- lower memory and compute requirements.
- Dot pitch on screens can be smaller since no sub-pixels.
- Optics can be tuned to a specific wavelength instead of having to fight with chromatic aberration due to the compressed optical pathway.
The first party games were (as usual for Nintendo fare) fun and quirky, but other than than Wario Land served more as tech demos. The one actually “3D” game for the console (Red Alarm) ran at a pitifully low frame rate. And also as today, there were no games for the platform that “didn’t work” in 2D, but they were for the most part enhanced by the stereo experience.
It was, as with most “virtual reality” experiments in the 90s, crippled by lack of processing power and cost constraints. It didn’t live up to its lead designer’s ambition and was rushed to market with little expectation of success.
I am excited for the games coming back, I really enjoyed Teleroboxer and Wario Land.
Caveat: I got it near the end of its life when blockbuster was selling off the ones they were renting. So for like 50 or 100 bucks we got the console and 4-5 games.
Was it perfect? No. But it was a Nintendo system and had some quite entertaining games. And some terrible ones of course.
It was a very interesting experiment. I’m sorry it was Gunpei Yokoi’s last project at Nintendo and he felt he had to resign from the failure.
I don’t know what “modern” people who weren’t around at the time think of it. And back then a lot of people really wanted it to be what it wasn’t. They really just wanted to judge it for not being the GameBoy Color.
It was a neat try at something totally different.
I hope having it available on the Switch virtual console means more people will play the games and find out just how good a few of them were.
The appeal is definitely somewhere between intrinsic and from the rarity - there's not just been no official way to play these games for the last 30 years, they've barely even gotten a passing mention, and even emualators have been few and far between. It was sad that Teleroboxer, Wario Land, and Mario Clash were basically lost to time.
The games definitely weren't up to to NES/SNES quality, but they were at least up to par with the average portable game at the time, which I think is what they were meant to be compared against. I see the Virtual Boy games as Game Boy games that suffered from the mechanics of the platform the platform they were released on. In that light, I think they compare pretty favorably to similar lesser-known games of the time; most WonderSwan games I've played, hell even a lot of Game Gear and Game Boy games, had much more serious gameplay issues, even though they were on hardware that was arguably less... challenging.
Which I think is the problem: The system wasn't really portable. When 3D was the rage, it was really a 2D system. I used the system at home when I was in the mood for "big" games.
Seems like it would have made more sense to make a 3D headset for the N64 as a high-end accessory.
There's always been a very very small and intense VB fandom, but outside of them I don't think there's a ton of real nostalgia for it. The thing sold less than a million units; most people at the time either never played it or maybe tried it at a K-Mart demo kiosk for a few minutes.
To whatever extent that people are getting excited about the Virtual Boy now, I'd pin it on its very unique retro-future aesthetic. In the same way that people who weren't even alive for the 80s got really into synthwave, there's something about visions of the future from a time when the future was actually exciting that people find aesthetically compelling.
As a child of the 80s and 90s, all things VR held a special place in my heart, even if they were terrible.
I never had one, never even played the real hardware, but owning one would excite part of my psyche for sure!
When Virtual Boy first came out, Blockbuster Video allowed you to rent the system with some games. We played it a few times and got sick of it before the brief rental period even ended.
The screens are each a bar of micro LEDs. Each eye has a mirror that oscillates every frame to smear the LED bar across your field of view.
If you've ever seen those bike wheel displays, where the light-up spokes make a pattern when the wheel spins - it's that, but as a VR headset.
https://youtu.be/jW7M8H99x7Y?si=9xjafT2tCresYC9l
What was fun for me was the fact that when this thing came out everybody I knew thought it worked by shooting red lasers at your eyes. There was very little internet to use to look it up either so I was shocked when this video showed how it really worked.
Was a random YT recommendation, so I didn't know the source off the top of my head.
For further background, they were developed from an earlier system called the "Private Eye" - still a few references to them on the web e.g. [0]. I've built a circuit to drive one from a Pi Zero - amazing gadgets for 90's tech.
Can't see the video from this location, so may be just restarting stuff in it.
[0] https://hackaday.com/2018/04/20/laser-projector-ditches-galv...
Another problem would be that 60º between sides is too little angular separation. When the current frame approaches the right edge of your vision field, the next side of the mirror is already in position to be reflecting the LEDs into the left side of the vision field.
A 2-sided rotating mirror might work, but that's more complicated to manufacture and mount, such that I'd guess they found the back-and-forth simpler. Or else they found that rotating mirrors would impose a torque on the whole device and that wasn't workable. You could rotate the two mirrors in opposite directions, but that would mean the viewports are scanning in opposite directions (one right-to-left), and I don't know what that would do for the perceptions of 3d and persistence-of-vision.
https://bsky.app/profile/wario64.bsky.social/post/3mdfvwdmdt...
I think that's more likely to mean projector-kun than project-kun, though it's hard to explain why I think so and it would be just a speculation.
I guess people don't want to wear things on their faces. And autostereoscopic screens, which don't require glasses, don't work so well for stationary TVs. The Nintendo 3DS was the only successful system with (auto)stereoscopic 3D so far. Unfortunately its first hardware iteration wasn't quite there yet, and the generally low resolution was an issue.
But I think it could easily have been an optional feature of the Nintendo Switch 2, if they had built in a movable lenticular lens array and a head tracking camera, just like in the "New Nintendo 3DS" (the original 3DS used a simpler but worse system).
To get to the original 1080p resolution, they would also have needed a screen with double the horizontal resolution (3840x1080 rather than 1920x1080), since autostereoscopic screens effectively halve the usable resolution. Games that don't support 3D would just show the same image for both eyes.
It could have been an optional feature even for games that support it, with a choice between a 30FPS 3D mode and a 60 FPS 2D mode, which comes down to the same amount of rendered pixels. An ML system similar to Nvidia's DLSS might even generate the 3D effect (left and right frame) from a single rendered frame by using the depth buffer. For a smaller performance cost.
But I guess the additional hardware cost doesn't justify a cool feature like that.
The 3D on it is a very neat trick, but it's mostly a distraction and there's something "uncanny valley"-like and unpleasant about it. I almost always play with the 3D slider off; it's easy for me to see why Nintendo gave up on it.
But mostly, you’d just turn 3D off. It was a gimmick, cut the resolution in half, and doubled processing requirements.
It just worked way better as a 2D screen. As you said, 2DS was good.
They should have just made the DS2, not gone for 3D. But such was the time.
I recently picked up a used New 3DS XL to give this a try for the first time, and I actually really like it. With the eye tracking, it's pretty good imo. Did you also try the later iterations of the hardware?
It might be a very individual thing, since everyone's vision can be quite different; if you enjoy it more power to you.
It is an optional featue of the switch/switch 2. There's a virtual boy headset you can buy! (Ships in february)