According to scholar Benjamin Nicoll, current trends in retro collecting and the proliferation of online video game-related content “fetishizes rather than critically account for failure and marginality.” With that in mind, let’s talk about a console whose name is synonymous with failure: the Nintendo Virtual Boy.
The console launched in Japan in July 1995 and was discontinued a little over a year later. After lackluster sales (approximately 777,000 total units sold), Nintendo stopped supporting the console and shifted gears to their new machine, the Nintendo 64. Only 22 games were officially released for Virtual Boy. It stands in the cultural imagination as Nintendo’s greatest failure and an ill-advised attempt at creating hardware based on a gimmick.
The new book Seeing Red: Nintendo’s Virtual Boy by José P. Zagal and Benj Edwards attempts to look at the console in a new light. Seeing Red is part of MIT Press’ Platform Studies series edited by Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort. In the words of Bogost and Montfort, the series “investigates the foundations of digital media — the computing systems, both hardware and software, that developers and users depend upon for artistic, literary, and gaming development.” The series has covered Atari Systems, the Game Boy Advance, and the Amazon Kindle, among other platforms.
Seeing Red is heavily indebted to the work of historians and video game journalists, specifically the work of Jeremy Parish, whose book Virtual Boy Works (2023), and Jeffrey Wittenhagen’s The Complete Virtual Boy (1995). Who would have thought that an academic, Zagal, and technology journalist, Edwards, would rely on fan passion projects and amateur historians as critical sources? There is a lot to unpack here. This speaks to the odd place that the Virtual Boy holds in video games’ history.
I’m not going to dwell too deeply into tVirtual Boy’s technological specifications in this review. If you want to know more about it, then this book is for you. Nevertheless, it’s important to give a little perspective.
Virtual Boy’s Virtual Diorama
Virtual Boy is remembered for its red graphics and appearance and stereoscopic 3D graphics. Anyone who has used the console and placed their face inside the headset display will be familiar with Virtual Boy’s two displays, one for the left eye and the other for the right eye. When viewed together, these displays created an illusion of depth. The console tricks the eyes.
Nintendo’s rival Sega created the first commercial stereoscopic arcade video game with Subroc-3D (1982). The game’s arcade cabinet required players to place their faces into a special headpiece shaped like a submarine periscope. This was not the first use of stereoscopic technology in games, and Zagal and Edwards go into further detail on this history. Needless to say, other games were made and released using similar tech even a decade prior. This, however, speaks to Nintendo’s proclivity of utilizing old technology to do something neat with it and advertising it as something novel to consumers.
In 1986, Virtual Boy’s key tech hardware, the scanned linear array (SLA), was invented by Reflection Technology based in Waltham, Massachusetts. Nintendo bought the technology in the early ’90s after it was demonstrated to them as a product called the Private Eye. Nintendo was sold on the Private Eye largely because “it could simulate absolute blackness where the [systems light emitting diodes] didn’t light.” This fascinated Nintendo engineer Gunpei Yokoi, one of the minds behind two of the company’s biggest successes, the Game & Watch and the Game Boy. Absolute blackness displayed on a screen would allow for the simulation or illusion of “limited space for the player to experience.” Yokoi saw the potential of this technology as a way for Nintendo to create something distinct from other gaming platforms.
Seeing Red delineates Virtual Boy’s visual layered diorama aesthetic, which is akin to peep boxes called Mondo Nouvo (new world) created by Venetian residents in the 1700s. These boxes allowed people to peer into exotic and lavish worlds. They were made from reflective lenses, mirrors, and candles and used to create shadows, visual tricks, and different perspectives. Zagal and Edwards argue that Mondo Nouvo can be called an earlier form of virtual reality and is a precursor of Nintendo’s Virtual Boy.
Virtual Boy as a console had a cohesive visual aesthetic between its games for the console and the hardware. This goes way beyond the console’s infamous red-colored graphics. As Zagal and Edwards reference, this visual signature was realized by a “shared visual aesthetic” between the games and how Virtual Boy displays them. Notable games like Mario Tennis, Virtual Boy Wario Land, V-Tetris, Red Alarm, and Jack Bros. utilize the hardware of the consolein similar ways. Though the visuals look and gameplay of these games differ, they nonetheless still retain what Zagal and Edwards call a layered diorama.
To play the Virtual Boy, players must look at “a miniature boxed game environment (the diorama)” that is not three-dimensional as we understand it in modern video games. Instead, the diorama in each display appears flat or two-dimensional. The illusion of depth is created when “the flat elements are placed at different distances from the viewer, thus constituting the layers of the layered diorama.” The best crystallization/comparison that Seeing Red describes Virtual Boy is “the Virtual Boy is effectively a digital peep box… [with] sophisticated motion and interactivity.” In a game like Virtual Boy Wario Land, the console’s capability to simulate depth allows for “dioramic layering effects” on the game sprite assets (the objects, characters, etc.) displayed on a level. It’s neat to view even today. Few consoles have tried to do something similar since.
Seeing Red Is Close to Definitive
To my disappointment, Seeing Red is not a direct study of the Japanese release of Virtual Boy or its wider contexts. Zagal and Edwards explicitly state that the book is “an in-depth examination of a platform, including its technical capabilities, the games that were created for it, and the technocultural context of the United States in the 1990s in which it was released.”
Regardless of the key omission, Zagal and Edwards succeed in reframing Virtual Boy as a console built on the tradition of immersive entertainment through Yokoi’s philosophy of “lateral thinking with withered technology.” Yokoi’s core design principles were rooted in expanding the audience for games and that the state of video games in the early ’90s needed to change to survive. Virtual Boy was his attempt. In Seeing Red, Zagal and Edwards dispel many misperceptions regarding the failure attributed to Virtual Boy. What a shame, as some of the games on the console are among the most inventive released on any Nintendo platform.
Even though Nintendo spent $25 million on marketing in 1995 for Virtual Boy, the company “was unable to ultimately convince consumers that this was a new platform worth paying attention to.” For one, the console did not have multiplayer support, making the experience of stereoscopic 3D a solitary experience. As a comparison, the original Game Boy was released alongside a link cable to play Tetris with up to two players. This was a key break from Nintendo’s fervent support of multiplayer experiences on their consoles.
Seeing Red is a very specific and intentional book. Those looking for an in-depth analysis of each game release on Virtual Boy should look elsewhere. Parish’s excellent and frankly required reading for anyone interested in the console, Virtual Boy Works, is available. To their credit, Zagal and Edwards conceded this lane to Parish and didn’t try to compete. However, this leaves readers with a nerdy predicament. Seeing Red and Virtual Boy Works should be read alongside each other – Virtual Boy Works for its visual documentation of the console and games, and Seeing Red for its researched accounts and interviews detailing the console’s creation and life span.
Seeing Red as a reading experience targets academics, game designers, and retro gaming die-hards. It’s full of detailed information on the history of virtual reality, stereoscopic 3-D, and other technical topics. It’s short in length but heavy on the details. It’s more approachable than one would think from an academic book from MIT Press with technical chapters like “Art of Stereoscopy: Blending Technology and Illusion” or “The Virtual Stage: A Layered Diorama.” Seeing Red and Virtual Boy Works are required reading for those who want to understand the Virtual Boy better.
Virtual Boy follows the tradition of wondrous human inventions made to trick our eyes. The fan community had its role in making the console more than just a gimmicky failure. Virtual Boy’s failure has long been touted as the key factor for Yokoi’s exit from Nintendo. Zagal and Edwards address this, and to my knowledge, it’s the first time that it’s disputed in an English-language source.
The Virtual Life Continues Beyond Virtual Boy’s Demise
Ultimately, Virtual Boy’s legacy lives on via fan communities that restore unfinished games, create homebrewed games, and expand the console’s capabilities. Important fan sites like Planet Virtual Boy have become spaces of community-led innovation and have helped the console have a second life. Almost 30 years later, some games still want to see red. This is evident with the release of the Red Viper emulator, which allows owners of Nintendo 3DS to emulate Virtual Boy games.
Virtual Boy’s problems are not unique. Nintendo is no stranger to notable commercial failures like that Labo Virtual Reality Kit. Even tech industry titans like Google and Apple have stumbled with the Google Glasses and the Apple Vision Pro. Consumers aren’t ready to embrace these products en masse. Nintendo wasn’t ahead of its time when it released Virtual Boy. We peer into Virtual Boy and virtual reality headsets as if viewing from a tower optical viewer on the top of the Empire State Building. Is the view worth the three hours plus lines and wait and the small fortune it costs to be able to peer into humongous binoculars? Regardless of the answer, read Seeing Red if you want to know more.
Works Cited
Nicoll, Benjamin. Minor Platforms in Videogame History. Amsterdam University Press. 2019.
Parish, Jeremy. Virtual Boy Works. Limited Run Games. 2023.
Wittenhagen, Jeffrey. The Complete Virtual Boy. Hagen’s Alley Entertainment. 1995.