Virtual Boy - WikiHQ

The Virtual Boy is a video game console developed and manufactured by Nintendo and released in Japan on July 21, 1995, and in North America on August 14, 1995. Promoted as the first system capable of rendering stereoscopic 3D graphics, it featured a red monochrome display viewed through a binocular eyepiece, with games employing a parallax effect to simulate depth. The console struggled commercially, and its limited market performance led Nintendo to discontinue production and game development in 1996, following the release of only 22 games.

The 32-bit Virtual Boy's development spanned four years under the codename VR32. Nintendo entered a licensing agreement with the U.S.-based company Reflection Technology to use its stereoscopic LED eyepiece technology that had been under development since the 1980s. In preparation for mass production, Nintendo constructed a dedicated manufacturing facility in China. Over the course of development, escalating production costs, health concerns related to the display, and the diversion of resources to the Nintendo 64 resulted in the downscaling of the project. Additionally, Nintendo's lead game designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, had minimal involvement in the development. The system was pushed to market in an unfinished state in 1995 to focus on the Nintendo 64.

The Virtual Boy was panned by critics and was a commercial failure, even after repeated price drops. Its failure has been attributed to its high retail price, unappealing red-and-black display, unimpressive stereoscopic effect, poor ergonomics, lack of true portability, and reports of adverse health effects such as headaches, dizziness, and eye strain. Stereoscopic technology in video game consoles was later successfully revived, notably including Nintendo's 3DS handheld console. It is by far Nintendo's lowest-selling standalone console, with just 770,000 units sold; for comparison, their second-lowest selling console, the Wii U, sold 13.6 million units.

History

Development

Since 1985, a red LED eyepiece display technology called Scanned Linear Array was developed by Massachusetts-based Reflection Technology, Inc. (RTI). Seeking funding and partnerships by which to develop it into a commercial technology, RTI demonstrated Private Eye to the consumer electronics market, including Mattel and Hasbro.

Nintendo enthusiastically received the Private Eye, as led by Gunpei Yokoi, the general manager of Nintendo's R&D1 and the inventor of the Game & Watch and Game Boy handheld consoles. He saw this as a unique technology that competitors would find difficult to emulate. Additionally, the resulting game console was intended to enhance Nintendo's reputation as an innovator and to "encourage more creativity" in games. While Nintendo's Research & Development 3 division (R&D3) was focused on developing the Nintendo 64, the other two engineering units were free to experiment with new product ideas. The startup screen of the Virtual Boy prototype was shown at Shoshinkai 1994. A "very confident" projection of "sales in Japan of three million hardware units and 14 million software units as of March 1996" was given to the press. The demo of what would have been a Star Fox game showed an Arwing doing various spins and motions. Cinematic camera angles were a key element, as they are in Star Fox 2. It was shown at E3 and CES in 1995.

As a result of increasing competition for internal resources alongside the flagship Nintendo 64, and little involvement from lead game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, Virtual Boy software was developed without Nintendo's full attention.

Release

The New York Times previewed the Virtual Boy on November 13, 1994. The console was officially announced via press release the next day, November 14. Nintendo promised that Virtual Boy would "totally immerse players into their own private universe". Initial press releases and interviews about the system focused on its technological capabilities, avoiding discussion of the actual games that would be released. Though slightly less expensive and significantly less powerful than a home console, this was considerably more costly than the Game Boy handheld. With seemingly more advanced graphics than Game Boy, the Virtual Boy was not intended to replace the handheld in Nintendo's product line, as use of the Virtual Boy requires a steady surface and completely blocks the player's peripheral vision. Design News described the Virtual Boy as the logical evolution of the View-Master 3D image viewer.

The Virtual Boy was released on July 21, 1995, in Japan, August 14, 1995, in North America with the launch games Mario's Tennis, Red Alarm, Teleroboxer, and Galactic Pinball and September 1995 in Latin America countries. It was not released in PAL markets. In North America, Nintendo shipped Mario's Tennis with every Virtual Boy sold, as a pack-in game. Nintendo had initially projected sales of three million consoles and 14 million games. Nintendo had shipped 350,000 units of the Virtual Boy by December 1995, around three and a half months after its North American release.

The Virtual Boy had a short market timespan following its disappointing sales. The last game officially released for the Virtual Boy was 3D Tetris, released on March 22, 1996. More games were announced for the system at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in May 1996, but these games were never released. In June 1996, Nintendo reported to Famitsu worldwide sales of 770,000 Virtual Boy units, including 140,000 in Japan. The system is number 5 on GamePros "Top 10 Worst Selling Consoles of All Time" list in 2007.

Promotion

Nintendo extensively advertised the Virtual Boy and claimed to have spent on early promotional activities. A campaign promoted NBC's late 1995 lineup alongside the Virtual Boy. American viewers were encouraged via television advertisements on NBC to rent the console for $10 at a local Blockbuster. This affordable demonstration Upon returning the unit, renters received a coupon for $10 off its purchase from any store. The promotion included 3,000 Blockbuster locations, and sweepstakes with prizes including trips to see the taping of NBC shows. The marketing campaign overall was commonly thought of as a failure.

Hardware

The CPU is an NEC V810 32-bit RISC chip,

Display

thumb|The screens of the Virtual Boy

The Virtual Boy is the first video game console capable of displaying stereoscopic 3D graphics, marketed as a form of virtual reality. Whereas most video games use monocular cues to achieve the illusion of three dimensions on a two-dimensional screen, the Virtual Boy creates an illusion of depth through the effect known as parallax. Like using a head-mounted display, the user looks into an eyeshade made of neoprene on the front of the machine, and then an eyeglass-style projector allows viewing of the monochromatic red image.

The display consists of two two-bit (four shade) monochrome red screens of 384×224 pixels and a frame rate of approximately 50.27 Hz. It uses an oscillating mirror to transform a single column of 224 red LEDs into a full field of pixels. Nintendo claimed that a color display would have made "jumpy" images and have been too expensive. and Nintendo promised but did not release a harness to wear while standing.

The Virtual Boy's heavy emphasis on three-dimensional movement requires the controller to operate along a Z-axis. Its controller is an attempt to implement dual digital D-pads to control elements in the 3D environment. The controller is M-shaped, reminiscent of the Nintendo 64 controller. The player holds onto either side of the controller which has a unique extendable power supply that slides onto the back, housing the system's six AA batteries. The batteries can be substituted with a wall adapter, via a "slide-on" attachment for constant power.

In more traditional two-dimensional games, the two directional pads are interchangeable. For others with a more 3D environment, like Red Alarm, 3D Tetris, or Teleroboxer, each pad controls a different feature. The symmetry of the controller also allows left-handed gamers to reverse the controls, as does the Atari Lynx.

Connectivity

During development, Nintendo promised the ability to link systems for competitive play. and Faceball was canceled.

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Hardware specifications

{| class="wikitable" style="font-size:90%;"

|+ Hardware specifications

! Processor

| Customized NEC V810 (NVC, P/N uPD70732) 32-bit RISC processor @ 20 MHz (18MIPS), 1KiB instruction cache

! Memory

| 128KiB dual-port VRAM 128KiB of DRAM 64KiB WRAM (PSRAM)

! Display × 2

| Reflection Technologies Inc. SLA Model P4, monochromatic red, LED display 384 × 224 pixel resolution (produced by mechanically scanning each 1 × 224 LED array) Four simultaneous shades per 4-pixel column (black + 3 red, of approximately 128 levels of intensity) 50 Hz double-buffered frame rate

thumb|A color mapping of the true spectrum of colors on the Virtual Boy before the LED shading. This "color spectrum" has no basis in reality, whatsoever. Source: I've been a VB developer for over a decade.

! Power

6 × AA batteries or 10V DC at 350mA AC adapter/tap (third-party performance adaptor DC 9V 500mA)

! Sound

| Custom "Virtual Sound Unit", 5 × wave channels, 1 × noise channel, 10-bit stereo output

! Controller

| 6 buttons and 2 D-pads, using NES controller protocol

! Serial port

| 8-pin cable with 8-bit serial transfer

! Hardware part numbers

! Weight

| 750 grams

! Dimensions (H × W × D)

| × ×

Cartridge specifications

{| class="wikitable" style="font-size:90%"

|+Cartridge specifications

|128 megabit addressable ROM space (4–16 megabit ROM used in released games) 128 megabit addressable RAM space (0–8 kilobyte Battery Backed RAM in released games) 128 megabit addressable expansion space (unused in any released games) CPU interrupt available from the cartridge Left and right audio signals pass through cartridge 60-pin connector

-->

Games

thumb|[[Mario's Tennis, the North American pack-in for Virtual Boy, is converted by an emulator to anaglyphic red and blue format, to simulate the Virtual Boy's stereoscopic display on a 2D display. ]]

Nintendo initially showcased three launch games and planned two or three per month thereafter. Third party support was extremely limited compared to previous Nintendo platforms. According to Gunpei Yokoi, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi had dictated that only a select few third-party developers be shown the Virtual Boy hardware before its formal unveiling, to limit the risk of poor-quality software appearing on the system.

When asked if Virtual Boy games were going to be available for download on the Virtual Console for the Nintendo 3DS, Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aimé said he could not answer, as he was unfamiliar with the platform. He noted that, given his lack of familiarity, he would be hard-pressed to make the case for the inclusion of the games on the Virtual Console.

The hobbyist community at Planet Virtual Boy has developed Virtual Boy software. It failed for several reasons including "its high price, the discomfort caused by play [...] and what was widely judged to have been a poorly handled marketing campaign". Next Generations editors were also dubious of the Virtual Boy's prospects after the show, and concluded their article on the system by commenting, "But who will buy it? It's not portable, it's awkward to use, it's 100% antisocial (unlike multiplayer SNES/Genesis games), it's too expensive and – most importantly – the 'VR' (i.e. 3D effect) doesn't add to the game at all: it's just a novelty."

Following its release, reviews of the Virtual Boy tended to praise its novelty but questioned its ultimate purpose and longtime viability. The Los Angeles Times described the gameplay as being "at once familiar and strange". Reviewing the system shortly after its North American launch, Next Generation said, "Unusual and innovative, the Virtual Boy can be seen as a gamble in the same way that the Game Boy was, but it's a lot harder to see the VB succeeding to the same world-conquering extent that the Game Boy did." They elaborated that while the sharp display and unique 3D effect are impressive, aspects such as the monochrome display and potential vision damage to young gamers severely limit the system's appeal. They added that the software library was decent, but failed to capitalize on Nintendo's best-selling franchises because games from The Legend of Zelda and Metroid were absent, the Mario games were not in the same style as the series's most successful installments, and it lacked a system seller to compare with the Game Boy's Tetris.

Though Nintendo had promised a virtual reality experience, the monochrome display limits the Virtual Boy's potential for immersion. The Washington Post said that even when a game gives the impression of three-dimensionality, it suffers from "hollow vector graphics". Nintendo, in the years after Virtual Boy's demise, has been frank about its failure. Howard Lincoln, chairman of Nintendo of America, said flatly that the Virtual Boy "just failed". According to his Nintendo and Koto colleague Yoshihiro Taki, Yokoi had originally decided to retire at age 50 to do as he pleased but had simply delayed it. Nintendo held that Yokoi's departure was "absolutely coincidental" to the market performance of any Nintendo hardware. The New York Times maintained that Yokoi kept a close relationship with Nintendo. After leaving Nintendo, Yokoi founded his own company, Koto, and collaborated with Bandai to create the WonderSwan, a handheld system competing with the Game Boy.

The console's focus on peripherals and haptic technology reemerged in later years. The original inventor, Reflection Technology, Inc., was reportedly financially "devastated" by the Virtual Boy's performance, with dwindling operations by 1997.

In February 2016, Tatsumi Kimishima stated that Nintendo was "looking into" virtual reality but also explained that it would take more time and effort for them to assess the technology, and in a February 2017 interview with Nikkei, he stated that the company was "studying" VR, and would add it to the Nintendo Switch once it is figured out how users can play for long durations without any issues. Nintendo introduced a VR accessory for the Switch as part of Labo, a line of player-assembled cardboard toys leveraging the console's hardware and Joy-Con controllers. In this case, the console's screen is viewed through goggles containing stereoscopic lenses.

Hobbyists adapted Virtual Boy to other displays. Emulation enabled modern stereoscopic goggles such as Google Cardboard, Samsung Gear VR and Oculus Rift in 2016. In 2018, hobbyist Furrtek released a board that replaces the display circuitry, allowing the Virtual Boy to be played on a VGA monitor or television set. On February 25, 2024, a homebrew Virtual Boy emulator for the Nintendo 3DS was released, named "Red Viper", which made it possible to play the Virtual Boy library using stereoscopic 3D.

Nintendo has referenced the Virtual Boy in other games, such as Tomodachi Life—where a trailer for the life simulation game includes a scene of several Mii characters humorously worshipping the Virtual Boy. In Luigi's Mansion 3, Luigi uses a device by Professor E. Gadd known as the "Virtual Boo" to access maps and other information in-game (succeeding the use of devices referencing the Game Boy Color and first-generation Nintendo DS in previous installments). Its menus use a red and black color scheme, with E. Gadd optimistically boasting that the device would "fly off the shelves". As of 2024, Virtual Boy merchandise is sold at the Nintendo Museum in Kyoto, Japan.

On September 12, 2025, Nintendo announced that it would be re-releasing Virtual Boy games through the Nintendo Classics service, available to subscribers of the Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack service for the Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2. The system displays two parallel images to recreate the stereoscopic 3D effect, requiring an enclosure that the Switch console is inserted into for proper play: either cardboard goggles not unlike the previous Labo kits, or alternatively a plastic mount based on the design of the Virtual Boy hardware. The Labo VR goggles are also unofficially compatible. The first 7 games launched on February 17, 2026, with 17 total games planned to be added to the service over time (only 16 in non-Japanese regions), including the previously unreleased Dragon Hopper and Zero Racers. A planned update will add the ability to display the games in colors other than red.