Seeing Red: Nintendo’s Virtual Boy is now available for purchase in print and e-book.
A complete list of references can be found in the book.
Nearly 30 years after the release of the Virtual Boy, not much is publicly known about exactly how Nintendo became interested in developing what would eventually become its ill-fated console. Was Nintendo committed to VR as the future of video games and looking for technology solutions that made business sense? Or was Virtual Boy basically the result of Nintendo going “off script” and taking advantage of a unique and possibly risky opportunity that presented itself? The answer is probably a bit of both.
As it turns out, Virtual Boy is not an anomaly in Nintendo’s history with video game platforms. Rather, it was the result of a deliberate strategy that was consistent with Nintendo’s way of doing things and informed by the design philosophy of its lead creator Gunpei Yokoi.
Getting into virtual reality?
Nintendo
The late 1980s and 1990s were a tumultuous time for virtual reality, and when it came to generating public interest, Japan was perhaps leading the way. In May 1991, Hattori Katsura Jinkō genjitsukan no sekai (The world of feeling artificial reality) was published. It was the first best-selling general-audience book on VR, predating Howard Rheingold’s watershed Virtual Reality by several months. Japan is also “where VR was first repackaged as a consumer technology” and by 1991 had more VR systems than anywhere else in the world.
However, VR was neither introduced nor perceived in the same way in Japan as in the United States. First, while VR research in the United States was largely developed and driven by military interests, in Japan it emerged from the context of telecommunications. Second, at least in the mid-1990s, Japanese VR research had an engineering emphasis rather than computer science as in the United States. The Japanese public’s perception of VR was thus shaped by the additional availability, for example through public demonstrations, of VR devices and experiences different from those shown elsewhere. These devices and experiences have been characterized in the United States as “cool gadgets” and “weird experiments,” but perhaps, taken together, they would provide alternative highlights of VR’s potential as a medium.
Prior to the release of the Virtual Boy, Nintendo designers and engineers expressed at least some interest in virtual reality. For example, when interviewed by Satoru Iwata about the development of Nintendo’s autostereoscopic Nintendo 3DS handheld, Shigeru Miyamoto commented, “Let’s start from the beginning, right now [just before the creation of the Virtual Boy], I was interested in virtual reality and was one of the employees who talked endlessly about how we should do something with 3D glasses. I didn’t exactly twist his arm, but I was going to talk to Yokoi-san about it [3D] glasses would be interesting.
However, not much is known outside of Nintendo whether this interest led to internal experimentation or the development of prototype virtual reality systems. Some reports, mostly second-hand, do exist that there was some research. For example, while researching an article about Virtual Boy for FastCompany, Benj Edwards interviewed Takefumi Makino, Gunpei Yokoi’s biographer and a friend of Yokoi’s for a period near Yokoi’s death in 1997. According to Makino, Nintendo had experimented with virtual reality before creating Virtual Boy. but found the experience unsatisfactory.
