Nintendo announced the revival of Virtual Boy. It is a dedicated peripheral that can be installed on the screen of Nintendo Switch 2/Nintendo Switch to experience the Virtual Boy gaming experience of that year. And there is also a cheaper version of origami (?)
Seeing this thing can’t help but remind me of all kinds of memories in the 1990s. Virtual Boy was Nintendo’s first failed console! Prior to this, many manufacturers launched better-performing consoles and handheld consoles for FC and GB, but they were all defeated by Nintendo.
SEGA launched the 32BIT SEGA SATURN, SONY’s PS generation, and the earliest 3DO! Nintendo announced in a strong stance that they will launch a new generation of home consoles with 64BIT-level CPUs. (Later N64) 32BIT will launch the Virtual Boy which was considered to be a new generation of GAME BOY at the time.
In fact, everyone is not very optimistic about Virtual Boy from beginning to end. Although if you experience it yourself, you will find the 3D effect very novel! But the only red and black pictures couldn’t help but feel unattractive. Especially at that time, major video game magazines were helping Nintendo promote this new console, and they also sent brochures to comprehensively introduce the Virtual Boy. But when I turned the page, I couldn’t help but feel that a bunch of red and black pictures didn’t have any appeal…
I didn’t buy GAME BOY back then. I thought the picture was yellow, green, gray, only black, and there were afterimages… But it was a success! It relies on its rich game library, affordable price, portability, and battery life. Even if other games have beautiful graphics and colorful graphics, as long as they can’t solve the above problems, they can’t beat Nintendo’s GAME BOY.
GAME BOY was developed by Gunpei Yokoi. The failure of Virtual Boy made Nintendo dissatisfied with him and he was happy to see him resign due to guilt. (It is said that Shigeru Miyamoto is also of this group.) After Gunpei Yokoi left Nintendo, he died in a car accident. Since the person responsible for the accident was registered as a Kyoto resident, some people suspected that Nintendo Co., Ltd., where Gunpei Yokoi once worked, deliberately instigated others to commit murder. (Because Gunpei Yokoi had already developed WonderSwan for Bandai at this time)
When I was young, I only thought that the Virtual Boy was a failed console. Now that I am close to the age when Gunpei Yokoi passed away, I feel that this man once had a great influence on Nintendo. He was also the first to advocate that Nintendo use concepts such as creativity and gameplay to deal with competitors in business strategies, rather than competing on performance. The failure of a Virtual Boy caused him to be attacked by enemies within the company. He left Nintendo and relied on WonderSwan to continue his career, but he died just like that…
Around 1996, a GAME store in Malaysia sold the Virtual Boy, which included a game for only RM150. I tried it and wanted to buy it, but the people around me stopped me! After 2000, middle-aged gamers began to collect second-hand games. When some people heard my story about the RM150 Virtual Boy, they said I was a treasure hunter! Of course, if I sell it, it will be a treasure! But at my age, the LCD screens I originally collected will become “preserved eggs”, the optical discs will have a shelf life, and the bald head of the optical disc player will be naturally damaged! I no longer have that obsession with collecting games and consoles. Being able to fully enjoy them in those days is the most precious harvest and memory! So many people around me are chasing the RGB CRT era in the high-definition era, because in their era they only used AV to connect to the TV to play! I have been lucky enough to have used several RGB TVs to play games in the 16BIT era. In my era, if you played RGB, you would be teased by AV or SVIDEO, and you would be a heretic! Now I listen to them talk about what PVM and color difference should be used to present the old game graphics… Haha!