When you strapped into the Tiger R-Zone headset, the real world would melt away, leaving you in a full-color, immersive 3-D world. Well, that’s what you’d think from commercial embedded above. But the R-Zone’s marketing was probably the most egregious example of false advertising in videogame history.
Introduced in 1995, the $30 Tiger R-Zone game console appeared to be a cheaper alternative to Nintendo’s own foray into mobile virtual reality gaming, the Virtual Boy. But contrary to what the ads may have implied, the machine didn’t feature 3-D graphics at all. Instead it projected simple, two-color graphics that you glimpse only momentarily in the ads. Nor was it immersive: the graphics were projected onto a screen in front of your right eye, while your left eye was free to wander.
Apart from a headset, it didn’t have anything in common with virtual reality at all. The device was actually a bizarre wearable videogame console, more of a horrid predecessor to Google Glass than to the Oculus Rift.
Keeping the game industry’s emptiest products in mind may help us avoid getting fooled again.
Today Tiger Electronics is probably best remembered for the Furby and the GigaPet line of “virtual pets,” but in the 1980s and 90s, the company was known for a line of cheap portable LCD videogames based on licensed properties, such as successful console or arcade games, or popular films or television shows. Unlike the original Game Boy, each R-Zone game was a stand-alone device that usually cost a bit less than a Game Boy game. They were a quick, cheap fix for videogame junkies, but the game play experience was, shall we say, lacking.
The graphics on these handhelds were incredibly simple. Much like a pocket calculator or digital watch, these games depended on a small number of static shapes that were lit up depending on what was supposed to be happening in the game. If you mashed the screen down, you could actually see all the different pictures.
The R-Zone was similar. The screen for each game was actually built into the cartridge, through which the machine beamed a red light that projected specific images onto a plastic surface that hovered in front of your eye.
Your one eye. Because it was balanced in front of only one eye, you had to cover the other to avoid going cross-eyed. As you can imagine, eye strain was a huge problem. Reviewers also complained about the responsiveness of the controls, and the way the control pad cable dangled in front of your face.
Unlike the Virtual Boy, which at least had something of a cult following, no one is even nostalgic for the R-Zone. It was really that bad. Check out this hilarious but profanity ridden rant from the Angry Video Game Nerd:
And then there’s this more considered but still utterly scathing review from RetroActive:
Facebook is hoping to finally bring virtual reality into the mainstream, but looking back at the R-Zone, it’s not hard to see why people are so skeptical of today’s virtual reality applications. And it’s not wrong to be cautious.
New virtual reality consoles like the Oculus Rift and the Samsung Galaxy VR are a giant leap forward over the Virtual Boy or Sega’s more advanced Sega VR. But we’ll probably see some new products hit the market that, just like the R-Zone, try to capitalize on the virtual reality trend without actually delivering anything that actually resembles virtual reality at all. Keeping the game industry’s emptiest products in mind may help us avoid getting fooled again.
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