Tech Time Warp of the Week: Before Oculus Rift, There Was Nintendo’s Disastrous Virtual Boy

Virtual Boy creates an immersive 3-D gaming universe so advanced, the voice says, “it can’t be viewed on conventional TV.”

The voice is talking from a conventional TV, so that’s a particularly tantalizing pitch. And the ad is tricked out with some ultra cool animated-polyhedron graphics. And the Virtual Boy itself looks even cooler. It looks straight out of The Lawnmowerman, and you can strap it on your own face!

As documented in this TV ad from the mid-’90s (see video above), the Virtual Boy was the Oculus Rift of its day. Released by Japanese game giant Nintendo in 1995, it promised to provide a virtual reality unlike anything that came before.

Sadly, it was a giant flop. And you could kinda tell it would be from the ad’s brief glimpse of Mario Tennis, Virtual Boy’s signature game. No, it couldn’t be viewed on conventional TV. But that doesn’t mean it looked good on Virtual Boy.

Virtual Boy’s graphics evoked old-fashioned 3-D movies—the kind you’d wear to red and blue glasses to watch—and Nintendo never really figured out how to take advantage of even this rudimentary VR. At a time when the Sony Playstation and Sega Saturn game consoles were already on the market and the Nintendo 64 was right around the corner, the Virtual Boy’s monochromatic graphics seemed downright retro. It just couldn’t compete with new first person shooters like Doom and Heretic.

“On some level, there seemed to be a belief that this was the inevitable endpoint of videogame progress—a 3-D world that you experienced through a head-mounted visor,” WIRED wrote in 2010 for the the console’s 15th anniversary. “Virtual Boy didn’t actually do that, but it sure looked the part.”

It did—and it has its own particular charm. Much like the doomed Power Glove and Power Pad helped pave the way for the Nintendo Wii, the Virtual Boy helped pave the way for the more successful Nintendo 3DS handheld. And with companies ranging from Sony to open sourcers like AntVR building new virtual reality headsets, this kind of thing may become actual reality. But it won’t play Mario Tennis.

Homepage image: Evan-Amos/Wikimedia