Yeah, VR! I love VR! Wait … what’s this hellish contraption?
Hellish is right. Everything about Virtual Boy, Nintendo’s first foray into ‘proper 3D’, seems designed to cause abject horror. The ad spot featured a bipedal Virtual Boy marching across a dystopian landscape, snaring a terrified human, while a voiceover growled it “needs your eyes”. And then there’s the problem of actually playing the thing. Because Nintendo didn’t want you impaling yourself on a fork when blindly stumbling around, you couldn’t strap the thing to your face like modern VR … so it had a stand.
So you had to sit perfectly still while you immersed yourself in virtual reality?
Well, it’s not like you were strapped in or anything. But yes, the console sat on a table, robbing Virtual Boy of portability as you craned your neck towards its eyeholes. While the red and black display got to work on your eyes, that terrible posture would play merry havoc with your back. Meanwhile, your hands – attempting through all this to grapple with a traditional game controller that you couldn’t actually see – would presumably be making plans to throttle you should you ever decide to play on this abomination again.
Still, it was Nintendo! So, beyond the pain, at least the games were good, right?
Nintendo thought so, breathlessly referring to Virtual Boy as the “first three-dimensional immersive 32-bit game system”. But whatever VR was around in 1995 got lost in translation. Mario was consigned to a poor revamp of 1983’s Mario Bros with two levels of screen depth, and the best game was a wireframe Star Fox-alike, Red Alarm. So the next time you get huffy with a modern VR headset that’s a bit weighty, exploring virtual worlds that aren’t quite pin-sharp, think yourself lucky VR has moved on in the past 30 years.
