The Sad Tale of Virtual Boy

April Fool's Day. However, I understand that many of my peers in the tech space are totally over it, and there's some legit criticism about it, right, like about how a lot of companies just put out stuff that isn't very funny and instead it just ends up being more misleading than it is silly. And I get it, you know, comedy is hard and some companies are just terrible at it. But one thing that I did see after the fact that got a chuckle out of me inspired this episode.

So it was a video on IGN's YouTube channel that supposedly was an announcement for the launch of a new Nintendo gaming platform, namely the Virtual Boy pro. So this video shows a woman who slots essentially a Nintendo Switch handheld gaming system into a headset, and then she puts

the headset on. Then we're treated to a first person perspective of supposedly her experience as her living room is transformed, you know, augmented reality style, and it turns into a gaming space, and she can you know, play games and make things run around her actual furniture, or she can place virtual cartoon furniture in her real living room, or she can transfer an anger Man into tom Nook from

Animal Crossing. And at one point she actually sees Luigi challenging her to a drag race as she drives around with a switch mounted to her face, which is a funny gag and also terrifying. It makes me think of all those videos of people walking around with the Apple headset on, and I'm thinking, just don't do that where folks can see you. Anyway. It also reminded me that while I have mentioned the Virtual Boy in past episodes, I never actually dedicated an entire tech stuff to that product.

And it's infamous for being one of the biggest products that flopped in tech history, at the very least one of the biggest flops in the gaming space, and certainly one of the biggest for Nintendo. And you know, when it came out from Nintendo, it was back in the day where Nintendo was an organization that was just knocking

it out of the park one after the other. Because by the time the Virtual Boy came out, you had the Nintendo Entertainment System or the Famine, You had the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, the SNES or Sness or Super Famicom, and then you also had the Game Boy, all of which had come out by the time the Virtual Boy came out. I mean, Virtual Boy's name is a nod to the Game Boy, and all of those systems sold

like gangbusters. So at that point, Nintendo was almost a company that was guaranteed to succeed, so the fact that it failed would become huge news. So let's talk about the Virtual Boy and its placed in Nintendo history and tech in general. Now, first off, some of y'all might not even know what the Virtual Boy was. Right, if you were born after the mid nineties and you've never really been into gaming or anything, you might not have

ever seen one. So it looked like a pair of red binoculars mounted on a little bipod stand like a tabletop or desktop stand. Unlike binoculars, there were no lenses on the front of the device, or I guess the back of the device, depending on if you're looking at it from the perspective of someone who's using it, in which case it would be the back of the device, or someone who's seeing someone else use it, in which

case it would be what you're looking at the front. Anyway, you would stand the Virtual Boy on a table and you would have to lean forward to look into the screen, so your forehead would go up against it. You'd look into it almost like a viewfinder, and you would then hold a wired controller that connected directly to the headset and you would play games. In many ways, it was similar to virtual reality headsets that we would see much much later. Right, These kind of looks like something like

an Oculus, except it's very red. It stands out through the color. But it looked like an Oculus headset in some ways. But again, it was mounted on a bipod that you would set on a table. And you have to remember Virtual Boy launched in nineteen ninety five, well before we would get something like an Oculus. In fact, in the middle in nineties, your typical real virtual reality

headset would be this super heavy head mounted display. Often you would need to suspend it from the ceiling with cables in order to offset the weight, because otherwise it would be far too heavy for someone to wear, at least for any real length of time. So the Virtual Boy was a big departure from what people had been used to if they, in fact had encountered virtual reality

systems at all. Not many people had. Some folks like me were lucky enough to live near a shopping mall that had a virtual reality arcade in it, so I had had experience with it, but not everybody did. And so I guess if you had never used one of these big systems, it wouldn't seem like such a huge deal that the form factor of the Virtual Boy was so small in comparison. But you wouldn't strap the Virtual Boy to your head, you know, you couldn't wear it

around and look at anything. It's not like you could wear it like an auction system. And there wasn't head tracking technology built into the Virtual Boy, although the initial plan was to have head tracking incorporated into the device. We'll talk about that. So this was really just a stationary console system that had sort of a viewfinder form factor that you would use, and even that was limited because it was monochromatic. But that's the quick description of

the physical product. But let's go down memory lane to talk about its development, and first we have to consider a couple of big components. Really one is the most important, and that is the rise of virtual reality and culture in the nineteen nineties, because that's what would drive a lot of the excitement, at least at Nintendo initially for

the development of the Virtual Boy. We also have to remember the length of a development cycle for a new console system and how much things can change in those linky development cycles. Right when a game system comes out, we have to keep in mind that's the product of years of work. Sometimes a company is working on the next generation of a system while it has yet to release the most recent generation. Right like, if you're getting a PS four, you can bet that Sony was hard

at work already on the PS five. So let's really think about virtual reality first. Now, the history of VR stretches back pretty darn far. Where you start largely depends upon what you think of as being the most important component of virtual reality. And you could argue that you go back to like stereoscopic camera systems from the nineteenth century. I think that's going too far. We're just going to start back in the nineteen fifties when Morton Heilig created

a pretty gimmicky device called the Sensorama. So the Sensorama was housed in a cabinet sort of similar to an arcade machine, and you would sit down in a chair at a like a little console, and your head would essentially be enveloped by this cabinet like you were leaning in in the sides of the case, and it would block your peripheral vision. The device would attempt to engage all of your senses to create a really immersive experience.

So there was a screen that you would look at, there were speakers that were designed to play kind of a surround sound experience to you. There were fans that could blow air on you. There were canisters containing stuff with strong smells, strong sense to kind of create a smell of vision sort of experience, and the chair that you sat in would vibrate then give you some haptic feedback.

Hilig made several short films to showcase his invention and what it was capable of, and I really wish I could experience one of those, just to get a first hand feel for what it was like. Apparently there were like half a dozen different titles, and I don't care which one it was. I would just like to really find out what it felt like to watch something in one of these and to have all the different effects go off. But I don't know of any that are working.

There might be one or two in different museums or whatever, but I've never come across one. Clearly. Though, the Cincerama didn't become a best selling product, however, it did illustrate that there was something really compelling about immersive technology that engaged multiple senses. Kind of like that. So in the nineteen sixties you had engineers at the pill Co Corporation who developed a head mounded display that had motion tracking technology incorporated into it. That was a big, big step

for VR. Now, this device was meant to give the wearer a real time view through a closed circuit camera. So this is actually more like an augmented reality or remote viewing technology rather than virtual reality. Remember, virtual reality is when you have all the images and sounds that you encounter generated by a computer. So augmented reality is when you're using technology to enhance or augment your experience

moving through a real space. This is kind of more like a virtual presence because again it gave you a chance to control a camera just by looking around. The intent of this particular technology was to allow humans to navigate through an environment that would be risky for humans to move through normally. It was a military technology, so you could imagine using something like this to diffuse a bomb, perhaps, or to scope out a war zone situation or something

like that. So turning your head would send a command to the connected camera, and the camera would then turn to reflect the way you were looking, and it would give you a new view of whatever situation you were in. So it wasn't strictly a VR application, but the head tracking technology would become a very important component in future VR applications. In the late nineteen sixties, Ivan Sutherland, who

had already proposed an idea called the Ultimate Display. He theorized that you could create a display that would make such a compelling immersive experience that for the viewer it would be indistinguishable from reality like that was his sort of premise that he was proposing. Well, he didn't create the ultimate display, that was more like a thought experiment. What he did do was he helped build technologies that

would get us closer incrementally toward his vision. One of those was a head mounted display that was sometimes called the Sword of Damocles because like the sort of Damoicles, it was suspended again from the ceiling. So this display connected to a computer system and not a camera, so instead of controlling a camera and getting a video view, you were truly getting a virtual environment that you could look around. But the sort of Damicles was huge. It

was very bulky, very heavy. Again, it had to be mounted to the ceiling to offset the weight, so that meant that it was really limited in what you could

do with it. Right, It's not like it was a portable device that you could just set up anywhere, but it did have head tracking technology included, so you could turn and look around inside a virtual environment, and again that would become a key component for V. Now we're gonna skip way ahead, but clearly tons of people were innovating in the space and they were generating ideas that would find their way into later iterations of VR technology.

Now at this stage, VR was largely a thing happening in research laboratories, and it wasn't something that was reflected in consumer products. In fact, the mainstream public remained blissfully unaware of virtual reality unless they also happened to be science fiction fans, in which case they may have read about these concepts relating to VR in various stories and novels, but chances are they had never had any first hand experience because again, it was mostly in R and D

departments in various tech companies. Now, one element that would become critical for the Virtual Boy itself was its LED display, which was somewhat infamous. It was a display that would only show red images on a black background. When we come back, I will talk about where that idea got its start, and it wasn't at Nintendo. But before we get into all that, let's take a quick break to

thank our sponsors. We're back, and before the break, I was talking about the Virtual Boys LED display, which would show you red images on a black background. Well, that all began with an engineer named Alan Becker, who was trying to invent a display that would boast a high

resolution and a suitable amount of brightness. So that you could do some computing in an environment, such as if you were sitting in an airplane seat, right Like, The problem was that a lot of portable computers and I used the term lightly because in this time, in the nineteen eighties, portable computers were very rare, and they were very heavy and bulky and didn't have a very good

battery life. But if you did happen to have one, chances are it was using a liquid crystal display, and those weren't necessarily you know, they weren't backlit, so if you were in a dimly lit environment, it'd be really hard to read anything that was on the screen. So what Becker wanted to do was to create a display that would be bright, high resolution, and inexpensive to manufacture. All of these things were really important if you wanted

to make a good display that could be a practical product. Obviously, if it was really expensive, then you would price yourself out of the market. So Becker thought you could use LEDs to draw images many times a second and then count on the persistence of vision to kind of do the rest of the work. And he invented a device that used an oscillating mirror to reflect LED images towards the viewer, and it worked. He named his invention the scanned linear array. A line of these LEDs would do

all the light. The mirror reflection would essentially draw the images in front of your eyes, and it worked, and the components he used weren't terribly expensive, So his hope was that he could make this something that could be put into mass production. But he would need to have a partner to be able to do that, because while he had invented this technology, he needed to have a fully fledged product for it to be something that could be sold on the market. So this was just a

step toward a goal. One of the components that he used, one that would become completely linked with Virtual Boy years later, were red LEDs. So these were LEDs light emitting diodes that only would emit red light. It's not some multicolored

diode here. And the reason why he used red LEDs, why he was restricted to just using red was the result of a partnership he formed with a manufacturing company that made printers, and the printers that the company made used red LEDs, so that's what Becker had access to. He could use the same sort of LEDs that were found inside this company's printers, and thus his displays could

only show red light on a black background. And anyone who's used a Virtual Boy will be familiar with that description because it's very much the same thing you would get with a virtual Boy. It had a monochromatic screen that could only display red on black. So Becker would later start a company called Reflection Technology, thus referencing the oscillating mirror in his device, and he would hire on

other engineers to work with him. And one other thing that they created was a much smaller display that, when you held it close to your eyes, could replicate a much larger display, which is a fancy way of saying stuff looks bigger the closer you are to it. So if you hold a small display up very close to your eyes, you know it still ends up filling up most of your visual field. So this too, would be

an important development for the Virtual Boy. Later on, they called this new product Private Eye, and I think that's pretty cute. The Private Eye and Becker's innovations would become well known in certain tech circles, as the company would demonstrate its technology at conferences and such, and it would play into the development of stuff like wearable computers, like this whole idea of computational systems that don't take the

traditional form factor of a desktop or laptop. Okay, we're going to leave off with reflecting technology for the moment. We will come back to them. Let's get back to the evolution of VR at the time. So we didn't even get the term virtual reality until nineteen eighty seven, So this is after reflecting technology has already started to

innovate in that space. And nineteen eighty seven was when a guy named Jarn Lanier, famous in VR circles, proposed the phrase, or at the very least elevated its use, because there's some who say he didn't coin the term, but he popularized the term. Either way, Lanier has a lot of the responsibility for VR kind of taking off as a concept in the late eighties into the early

and mid nineties. Okay, now we're going to switch over and talk about the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Nintendo company for a second, because the NES would actually introduce a peripheral that had some VR elements to it, even though it ultimately is not a device that was made by Nintendo itself. But you know, I've done full episodes about Nintendo. We're not going to go over the entire history of the company, besides which Nintendo is more than

a century old. It actually has its origins connected to playing cards back in Japan. But the important part for our purposes is that Nintendo swept into the home video game market at a time when in America at least it was in a shambles. That is, the market was in a shambles. The early nineteen eighties saw an explosion in video game consoles and titles, some of which were clearly rush jobs. They were just terrible games or very

poorly made. The glood of systems and games got dumped on a market that just couldn't sustain all that stuff, and eventually everything just collapsed sometime around nineteen eighty three, and when the dust cleared, companies like Atari, which had been a dominant force in home video games, were all

but obsolete. In the wake of that crash, retailers were really wary of carrying another home system, so the general wisdom was that consoles were kind of over as a thing, at least in North America, and the way the future was actually the personal computer. Then we get Nintendo now the company had launched its first full video game console system, called the Famicom or family computer, back in Japan in nineteen eighty three, the same year where video games crashed

in North America. Nintendo executives had aspirations of entering the American market, but they really faced an uphill battle because of the disaster that was that video game crash. However, in nineteen eighty five, the Nintendo Entertainment System would debut in a few test markets to great success and with some very clever marketing by Nintendo, which implied the NAEs was really, in fact a computer system and not a

video game console. The very much video game console would find itself carried in American stores from late nineteen eighty five through the rest of that decade, Nintendo was a powerhouse. It was seen as being unbeatable. It helped resurrect the home video game market in North America. The company put out tons of great games that delighted folks all around the world. And so now we're going to skip up

to nineteen eighty nine. So this is just two years after Jaron Lanier had started to popularize the phrase virtual reality, and that's when Nintendo introduced a controller peripheral for the NES called the Power Glove. Now, as the name implies, it was a controller that was in a glove or gauntlet form factor and on the back of the forearm of this clove was a variant of the standard NES controller had some extra buttons and stuff on it that

really complicated the interface. But the idea was that this glove could take on specific hand motions and reinterpret those as various commands that you could program the glove to let you control a video game with your hand without having to hold a controller and you know, push the direction pad and the buttons and stuff. It was a cool concept. I mean, it had a high learning curve because just figuring out how to program the thing was

a bit of a challenge. It also had a really cool look depending upon your esthetic, but you know, kind of a chunky, science fiction look to it. You can easily see pictures of it. If you're not familiar with the Power Glove, you can just do a quick search and see lots of pictures of the Power Glove. Now, the Nintendo itself wasn't responsible for the development of the Power Glove. There was another company called the Abrams Gentile

entertainment or age that developed this device, this peripheral. They modeled it after other wearable control systems that were more expensive and complicated and had more features that were being used in research and development labs, but were not meant to be consumer products. So they partnered here in North America with Mattel to manufacture the peripheral in the United States. There were other companies that would be manufacturers in other

parts of the world. Obviously, the developers really had to reduce the complexity and utility of the form factor in order to get the device to a level that could be mass produced for a reasonable price. So while it was based off similar technologies that were kind of transforming virtual reality research and development in various labs, it was a much more modest peripheral. Now, the power Glove sold

pretty well. It wasn't a blockbuster like the Nintendo Entertainment System, but it did okay, and I would argue it was one element that would elevate the concept of VR among the general public, even though the power Glove really meant as a replacement for a standard controller and nothing more than that. While the sales figures were good for the gadget, the reviews were decidedly mixed to negative, which is being kind.

Though interestingly, folks in the VR space would end up using the power Glove devices later in the nineteen nineties after the ground would fall out for funding VR projects, which I might come back to to mention a little bit in the end of this episode. So Nintendo sort of dips the corporate tow in VR waters in the late nineteen eighties, though again the company itself didn't develop the Power Glove, and the Power Glove is just a peripheral,

not of true VR device. But virtual reality was starting to take hold in the public imagination. Right before, the public was largely ignorant of VR in general, but now they're starting to understand at least a version of what VR could be, and that was starting to build in excitement and height. By the early nineteen nineties, that was really ramping up, largely because of both advancements in technology

as well as depictions and media. You started getting science fiction films that were playing with the concept of virtual reality, and folks were thinking, Wow, this will be the next era of computing. Meanwhile, Reflection Technology, the company that made the Private Eye display, they had continued to innovate around their Private Eye design, and they built a cheap demonstration

model of a head mounted display. They were able to outfit it with head tracking technology and they used a pair of Private Eye displays, one for each eye, and they put all of this on top of like a welder's mask, so you can put this mask on. It would have the head tracking technology and the displays built into it, and then you could play a little video game demo they made in which you would fight against tanks.

So if you turned your head in real life, your perspective would change within the game, so by looking around you could identify tank targets and fire at them using a controller and destroy tanks this way. And it was a simple demo, but a really compelling and effective one. The demonstration was a hit for folks who've got to try it, although the system also had some latency, which meant it could be pretty easy for at least some people to feel a bit of motion sickness after using it.

Latency in this case is the delay between taking an action such as turning your head and then seeing the result play out, which would be like your perspective changing as you turn your head. So we humans are pretty sensitive to latency. A noticeable lag between when you turn your head and when your perspective changes is really off putting, and personally, I find as I get older, I am far more susceptible to motion sickness from this kind of thing.

So I'm pretty sure that after just a few minutes of playing this, I probably would have felt rumbly in

the tumbly, so to speak. Anyway, Reflection Technology started to try and find an application or a partner to work with to bring this invention to market and to just pull it out of R and D and put it into some sort of product, and they approached a lot of different companies in the gaming and toys space, so like Sega was one of them, and Sega said no. They weren't terribly crazy about the monochromatic display, which could still only show just red on a black background, and

they weren't really keen on the idea that kids might get dizzy and puke after playing the device for just a couple of minutes. That seemed like a tough sell. So Sega passed on it, and a lot of other companies said yeah no, thanks to this private eye headset. But Reflection Technology had better luck in meeting with you guessed it, Nintendo. So at this point Nintendo was writing super high. The Neees was a mega blockbuster hit, the

Game Boy was an incredibly popular handheld system. The Super Nintendo didn't do quite as well as the ns did, but sold tens of millions of units. So the company is the high bar in the gaming space. And fortunately, when Reflection Technology would send a representative to Japan to meet with Nintendo executives, they would find a company that was interested in taking some risks and making a big change in just the way that people play games, and

that was never a guarantee. But there was one person in particular at Nintendo who would become sort of the champion and cheerleader of the Virtual Boy project named Gunpay Yakoi, and he found Reflection technologies demonstration of their private eye headset to be really exciting, and he also really liked that they had found ways of using inexpensive components to get an incredible result, which is of course a key decision if you want to mass market something to the

general public. So he would become a large reason why Nintendo would take a big chance with this private eye technology to develop what would become the Virtual Boy. I'll tell more about the Virtual Boy's story in just a moment, but before we do that, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsors. Okay, before the break, I mentioned gun pay Yukoi was really excited by this, and he was particularly enthusiastic about this idea of playing games in

a new and different way from other consoles. So his focus had always been on finding new means to allow people to play, not just video games, but just play in general, Like why should we be limited to a specific form factor like a screen and a controller? Why

should that be the only way we play? He was also not a fan of how the industry was trending toward a race to push faster, more powerful machines is sort of the sole path towards success, which I think anyone who's been into gaming in the last decade or

so kind of can really identify that. That is a trend that continued at least between Sony and Microsoft, right, Like, every time new consoles come out between the two of those companies, you pretty much just break it down by comparing stats and specs, and there's not much other innovation there, Like, yes, the new machine can process things faster with a better frame rate and higher fidelity graphics, but otherwise everything's the same.

You're still playing with a controller. Maybe you get a little innovation now and then, and sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. So like Sony Move definitely had a higher success rate than the Microsoft Connect for that for example, you call over at Nintendo. He wasn't interested in just pushing for better graphics and better sound and just have that be the defining factor for game systems. He wanted

to find new means of letting people play games. And you can see some of Yakoi's philosophy and other Nintendo products that came out even after his passing, such as the Wei console, I would argue, kind of embraces this philosophy. The Wei didn't have the same processing power as the competing consoles on the market at the time, but it did introduce innovations in gameplay that made the console a

huge hit for the company. People who never bought a game system got interested in the Wi because of its approach to gameplay. Anyway, Yacoi saw the private Eye system of reflecting technology as a means to innovate beyond just making consoles more powerful. Yakoi thought the darkness of a Private Eye headset without the LEDs on were a pure black, and it meant that you would have a perfect canvas

for your games. That players would be unable to see the edges of the display itself because it would all just be black, and so they'd be completely immersed in whatever world the game developers wanted to create. Well, it was a really compelling vision from a game developer perspective, no pun intended, or maybe no pun nintended. The Reflection Technology team got what they wanted, and then some Nintendo agreed to a worldwide exclusive license to the Private Eye

headset technology. Reflection Technology got a hefty licensing fee plus guaranteed royalties, not a bad deal. The development at that point started to shift toward Nintendo, and the company encountered

a few challenges along the way. So originally Yakoi was hoping to create a wearable headset with the Private Eye display as sort of the Crown Jewel, but it turned out that to build a system capable of playing different games, the company would need to build in a CPU that had a tendency to emit a lot of electromagnetic radiation and the two problems that this would raise is that one, there wasn't enough research on the subject to determine if having an EMF emitter that close to your noggin was

medically safe, so the company would be taking on risk. Right if it were discovered later that, oh, having something blasting EMFs that close to your brain is going to give you a brain rod or whatever, then Nintendo could be potentially liable. So that was one problem. The other was that if you were playing close to other EMF emitters, you could end up getting a lot of interference and

that would impact your gameplay experience. To solve for these problems, Nintendo chose to cap the processor with a metal plate and that would block these emissions so that you didn't have to worry about it. However, the metal plate added a significant amount to the weight of the device, which meant it was no longer practical as a wearable headset because no one would want to wear it for long enough to play a full game. It would just be

too heavy. So first, Yukoi explored an alternative solution, which would be to have the display mounted on kind of a structure that would fit over the player's shoulders. So this way the player could still wear the device. It'd be kind of like being a batman in the Tim Burton Batman film, where you couldn't turn your head. You had to move your whole upper body to turn. But this approach would be mean the weight would be distributed on the shoulders rather than on the head, and that

meant that you could still have some tracking technology in there. However, lawyers at Nintendo were worried about scenarios in which a player could be injured while wearing the gadget, like if they're just walking around their house and then toppled down a flight of stairs or something. So because of the perceived liability they would encounter if they used this design, they mixed that approach, so then ya Koi had the

face facts. The only way he was really going to get this new system approved and out the door was to turn it into a stationary console. So if it's stationary, if you're just going to put it on a bipod, as they ultimately chose to do, that means you no longer need to have any head tracking technology in it

at all, because it's not moving, it's staying still. The new concept would be a headset just mounted on a bipod that you would PLoP on a table or desk and you would just lean forward and look into a display instead. Now, on the bright side, that motion sickness issue wouldn't be as big a deal this way, because even if you had latency, well, it's not like you're moving your head around expecting to see your point of

view change instantaneously. Now, according to a wonderful piece by Benja Edwards in Fast Company titled Unraveling the Enigma of Nintendo's Virtual Boy twenty years later, I highly recommend you read it if you're interested in the Virtual Boy. It goes into much greater detail. Well, Yakoya himself began to feel misgivings about this project. He had to compromise several times in order to get his product designed to a point where the company would actually give it a go

ahead to go into production. And part of making all these compromises meant that, despite the fact that the Virtual Boy was now going to be a tabletop device, he also was not allowed to upgrade the processors so that it could display great graphics. I mean, now he's like, well, if we're not worried about weight, because it's not going

to be worn in any way. Maybe we could put in a different processor and have higher fidelity graphics in this thing, but Nintendo said, no, We've already invested in the reflection technology approach, so it doesn't make sense for us to switch that. So you're going to be stuck with those specs. It meant that he would have to use things like wireframe graphics or simple sprites, and you could argue this was a sunken cost fallacy issue that Nintendo was like, well, we can't switch now because we've

already spent too much money. But you know, there are some practical limits here. I mean, you could also argue that Nintendo was a company that this stage was essentially printing money and they could have invested more heavily into Virtual Boy, but that just didn't unfold. So it meant that Yakoi was stuck with some design elements that were really limiting, and even though he could have tried to push for a device that had more compelling selling points,

the company just wasn't interested. So, as Ben Edwards explains in that brilliant Piece and Fast Company, Nintendo had also commissioned studies to look into how the LED display might adversely affect vision. Again, Nintendo wanted to make sure this gadget wasn't going to cause legal problems for the company Further down the line, it wouldn't do for Nintendo to release the Virtual Boy only to discover that after a prolonged session of play, kids were complaining that their eyeballs

didn't work so good. So they commissioned this study, and apparently the study found that as long as the vertical alignment of the two screens was correct, then there really were no issues with vision. If one screen, however, was at a different vertical alignment than the other screen, kids could develop a lazy eye, particularly if the kid was

younger than seven years old. So Nintendo made some design adjustments to ensure that the two screens were properly aligned, and just for good measure, they slapt a warning on the device saying that kids under the age of seven shouldn't play with it. There were other warnings that the company released as well. The system itself would remind players regularly, like you know, like every fifteen minutes that they should

take a break to rest their eyes. And because there was this incredibly harsh law in Japan that essentially said a company would be liable if someone used one of their products and then got injured unless the company explicitly

warned users against that specific use case. So, in other words, like you would have to anticipate all the ways that customers might use your product that could be done in a dangerous way, and you would really need to lay it out clearly that you're not supposed to use it this way, because if they did use it that way and they got hurt, they could sue the company and there'd be legal standing for it. You couldn't just argue, well,

this was an unreasonable use of the technology. No one is supposed to do that, because they would say if no one's supposed to do it, why didn't you say so. So, in other words, Nintendo would go overboard explaining out how you were not supposed to use the Virtual Boy in order to limit the liability, And the result was that the manual made it sound like the Virtual Boy was about as safe as going skydiving without taking a lesson first.

So it created a reputation for the Virtual Boy as being potentially dangerous, But really it was just a manifestation of a company trying to head off potential lawsuits. In the future. Now, the first time folks outside of Nintendo itself could give the Virtual Boy a whirl, which up to that point the project was actually named VR thirty two. It hadn't received the Virtual Boy brand yet. Well. The first time was at a software industry conference in Japan,

and this was in late nineteen ninety four. At that time, Nintendo's hope was to sell the Virtual Boy in North America for around two hundred dollars, and they had high hopes that they would see really healthy sales by the end of the first year on the market, and boy, howdi that would not be the way it would play out. Meanwhile, the reaction among the attendees of this conference was one of the fuddled apathy. The monochromatic display was a big turn off. I mean, people were starting to get used

to pretty decent graphics at this point. It was also kind of lame that you had to PLoP this device on a table and then lean forward to view anything. Pretty quickly, folks noticed that unless you had the height just right between you and the Virtual Boy, you were likely going to have to binge your neck in such a way that pretty soon things would be uncomfortable. So It wasn't exactly a stellar debut, but Nintendo continued on.

They showed the Virtual Boy off at the following Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas, Nevada, and again they got a pretty lackluster response among the press in the public, which wasn't a great sign. But what was worse was that back in Japan, the press was latched onto those warnings that Nintendo had included both on the systems and in the manual. So again, Nintendo was doing this in an effort to avoid legal problems due to a really

harsh law in Japan. But the question the prescot was that the Virtual Boy was dangerous, that it was potentially bad for your eyesight, which in fact, none of the studies Nintendo had commissioned seemed to back up. It was again just that they were trying to avoid issues because of this pretty restrictive law, and instead the Virtual Boy got a reputation for being bad for your eyes and that reputation was another strike against the system. It really did a number on sales in Japan, or at least

was a big contributing factor to that. I don't think you could point to any single reason as why it would sell terribly in Japan, but there were lots of different factors that kind of converged at the same time. Nintendo launched the Virtual Boy in Japan on July twenty first, nineteen ninety five. The launch in North America was on August twenty first of nineteen ninety five, and like I said, sales in Japan were super slow. They didn't even hit

two hundred thousand units sold. According to most sources I found. They did better in North America, but it was like a blockbuster hit. It just sold better than it did in Japan. The final retail price, at least initially when it launched in America, was lower than the two hundred dollars that was expected. It was at one seventy nine

to ninety five. And if we ad just for inflation, that means the Virtual Boy system costs around three hundred and sixty five dollars in today's money, So three hundred and sixty five bucks. That's one dollar for every day of the year that you're not playing the system. Assuming it's a leap year, you play it that first day and never touch it again. Sales were better, like I said, in North America, but they did not meet Nintendo's hopes.

They weren't anywhere close to what the company had been projecting. They were thinking sales would be in the millions of units. It didn't hit a million in the US, so in October nineteen ninety five they lowered the price down to one fifty nine ninety five. But in Japan they made a much more drastic decision. Within six months of launch, they decided, yeah, this is not working. It is a total flop, and they pulled the plug and oof, the Virtual Boy was gone in Japan, six months after I

had launched a huge black eye for Nintendo. Virtual Boy would have a better lifetime in North America, or at least a longer one. It lasted about a full year before Nintendo killed it off here at North America. By then, the system was selling for just ninety nine dollars, so it was a clear whiff from Nintendo, and it seemed the folks at the company were awfully embarrassed by the whole thing, and Yakoi himself would he would have one

more hit at Nintendo before he would retire. He was already considering retirement from Nintendo to pursue other opportunities before the Virtual Boy thing even became a Nintendo project, but he did leave after one more success. The press would consistently link his retirement with the failure of Virtual Boy. However, and tragically, he would die in a car accident just a couple of years after retiring, So his story is a very sad one. Tons of reasons that The Virtual

Boy failed. For one thing, it wasn't actually a VR product by the time it came out, you know, it lacked most of the components that folks tend to associate with VR. It didn't have It wasn't wearable, it lacked head tracking, and so it really wasn't virtual. And yet it was called the Virtual Boy, again a nod to the Game Boy handset system, which was incredibly popular, so people thought that was hubris. The Virtual Boy had a

limited library of games. That was partly because Nintendo had this corporate culture at the time in which different departments were kind of competing against one another. The idea was that by competing against each other, the best ideas would rise to the top. It would compel them to really push the company forward. But it also meant that some of the top tier titles and characters were not really available for Virtual Boy titles, and that really set the

game system back quite a bit. The form factor was another big strike against the Virtual Boy. That bipod stand made it awkward to play the system, and he really could get a sore neck from the thing. The press, particularly in Japan, played a huge part in discouraging the public from adopting the system and played up the supposed risks of the device, despite you know, not having evidence

to back up the supposed harmful effects. The limitations of the display also hurt the Virtual Boy's chances in the market. Nintendo's refusal to upgrade components to support better graphics meant it was stuck with that monochromatic screen, which, while innovative and cost effective and boasting a really sharp resolution, still had real performance limitations. And then, not too long after the Virtual Boy kind of flopped, there was a bigger

flop in VR in general. Right Like, people got disillusioned by virtual reality because the experience they had was not what they expected given all the hype and the media representations and such, and so the interest and support for VR dropped dramatically before the end of the nineties, leaving VR research and development projects without much funding or support, and things would take a lot longer to progress because

people just didn't have the assets they needed. They were still working in the field, and they were taking advantage of things like the power Glove, for example, to kind of take up the slack that was left since they didn't have the funding to build all new hardware. But yeah, Virtual Boy was just one drop in the bucket of

the failure of VR in the nineties. But my virtual hat is off to ign for a really fun April Fool's gag with the Virtual Boy pro and again, if you want to learn more about the system and the stories behind it, including more details about the tragic ending for Yakoi, then make sure to read BENJ. Edwards article unraveling the Enigma of Nintendo's Virtual Boy twenty years later over on Fast Company. It's really well worth a read.

I drew from lots of different sources for this episode, but that piece in particular had a wealth of information about the failed Nintendo system. That's all. I hope you had a good April Fool's Day. I hope for those of you who were able to view the eclipse that happened today, I hope it was a great experience. Actually, took a little break from recording this episode to do it, and it was neat and I hope you're all well and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff

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