Nintendoland: Virtual Boy

In the spring of '94 rumours about Nintendo's VR-project started circulating in the media. It was Gunpei Yokoi and his R&D1 team [research and development team 1] that, with the aid of the people at Reflection Technology Inc., had been working on the Virtual Boy for two years. Speculation began about how the new machine would revolutionize the gaming market and sketches of the VB began to circulate. By the time the Shoshinkai-exhibition came the hype was enormous! Everybody wanted to know what Gunpei Yokoi had accomplished this time. (Gunpei is the genius that developed both the Game Boy and the Game & Watch machines, so the expectations were quite high!)

Shoshinkai Software Exhibition 1994

    Every year Nintendo of Japan traditionally introduces their newest games and consoles to gamers and insiders on their own tradeshow, the Shoshinkai. At the end of 1994, it was the Virtual Boy's big day in the Harumi International Trade Center in Tokio, when it was first shown to the public.
    As big as the hype was before Shoshinkai, as big was the disappointment when finally the curtain fell to reveal Nintendo's "wondermachine" to the public... A bizarre looking, bulky red piece of hardware on a stand, plus only three games in early state, which all looked pretty poor and were absolutely nothing revolutionary. What should people think about that? Still it was from Nintendo, the biggest and most respected videogame company of the world, but the three playable games shown, "Mario Bros. VB", "Space Pinball" and "Teleroboxer" were half finished at best and really nothing that could excite the visitors of the show. A lot of them even complained that the system was uncomfortable and that it would cause headaches after a short time.
    Not only the games, but also the Virtual Boy itself was only shown in prototype form, the display systems were running off AC Adaptors. The displays were placed around some blue "pillars", which had Virtual Boy logos on them and screens, on which demovideos were running. Hosts explained the system to visitors. By the end of Shoshinkai, not to many positive articles of the Virtual Boy were left in the media, to many, this was already a dieing cause.

Consumer Electronics Show 1995

In 1995, the Consumer Electronics Show was still one of the biggest of its kind. On friday, January 6th, through monday, January 9th, the show was held in the Las Vegas Convention Center, the Las Vegas Hilton, the Mirage and Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. More than 2.000 exhibitors and 90.000 attendees presented their new stuff in video games, computer, multimedia, audio and video on a total space of more than a million squaredeet. The show was only for people related to the industry, "normal" gamers could't get in.
Atari, Sega, 3DO, lots of third parties and, of course, Nintendo, having the slogan "Fast Forward!" on this show, were present in the videogames-area und showed off their new hard- and software. One of the stars on the show surly was the Virtual Boy, which was presented to a western audience for the first time.

Electronics show

    In the early morning of the first day of the show, Nintendo helt a press conference (pic on the left), to inform chosen representatives of the media about their plans for the future. After Peter Main (Nintendo's vice president of marketing) talked about the future of the 16-bit consoles, Ultra 64 and the Virtual Boy for an hour, he finally became more concrete. After the disunited reactions on Nintendo's 32-bit console on the Shoshinkai exhibition in november in Tokio, Nintendo was very careful to emphasize that the shown hard- and software were all prototypes, which mainly should demonstrate the 3d graphic capabilities of the Virtual Boy. The price of the VB was said to be $200, the prices for software about $50. Nintendo also said that the lauch, which should be in april simultaneously in the USA and Japan with "Virtual Mario", "Space Pinball" and "Teleroboxer" as launch-games, would be supported by a 20 million dollar marketing budget and that they wanted to sell 2 million systems and twice as much games in the USA until march 1996...

    The Virtual Boy area, which one had to get passes for, was housed in a dome and basically was a two-part walk through an enclosed area. In the first, dark room you could have a look at several game- and technical demos running on six big screens. Using special cardboard 3d specs the images were 3d, just like the 3d effects of the Virtual Boy unit. On the first screen an early demo of "Red Alarm", which was considered the worst Vrtual Boy game on the show, though most likely because of its early state, was running, the second showed "Space Pinball", the third "Teleroboxer", on screen 4 the Dolphin- and Racing Demos were alternating, 5 showed a very early and raw demo of "Vertical Force", still having a simple "shoot 'em up!" working title, and screen 6 alternatively showed the "Starfox Demo" and a short "Mario Land" demo.
    In the second room of the Virtual Boy area one could play prototypes of "Space Pinball" and "Teleroboxer" at about 10 displays. Interestingly, "Space Sinball" had 5 instead of 4 tables. The prototype was at best 50% complete and its ball-physics were way off, but it had some of the best 3d-effects on the show. Teleroboxer was about 75% completed.
Also another game was announced, which was "Virtual League Baseball".

Overview

On the 21st of July, 1995, the Virtual Boy was released in Japan, and in North America a month later. Nintendo thought it would sell very well (they hoped it would sell 3 million copies) because the Virtual Boy didn't have any competing consoles. Both the Saturn and the Playstation played in a totally different league. They couldn't have been more wrong! In Japan, the VB sold poorly and the price dropped drastically on both the machine and the games. Nintendo estimated that the VB would sell 250,000 copies in Japan but it ended up selling less than 50,000! One problem that arose (which worried the parents) was that it was said that playing the VB could cause eye damage to children under the age of seven. In the US, the machine hardly sold at all and it was never released in Europe. Players bought Playstations and Saturns instead, even though they cost twice as much! At Shoshinkai 95' Hiroshi Yamauchi (President of Nintendo) confessed that the machine had sold less than Nintendo had calculated, but they hadn't lost all their hope for this strange product yet. New games that made better use of the VB´s special skills were to be released. Unfortunately, by now most of the players of the world weren't interested in the Virtual Boy. Nintendo just had to live with the fact that the Virtual Boy was a flop! One year later [1996], the Virtual Boy was discontinued.

And for the record, they don't make Virtual Boy games anymore...

R.I.P. Gunpei Yokoi

Credit to Planet Virtual Boy for the Comusmer Electronics 1995 information, and the Shoshinkai video.