I am currently writing an article about Sega and its rise and fall. Ultimately that piece of writing will be a truthful and brutally honest commentary on HOW that company blew it and now no longer makes consoles. But in the process of writing that, I thought: Nintendo has had some stinkers too. The Power Glove was Nintendo's worst peripheral back in the 80's, so bad that even its 90 minute movie/commercial starring Fred Savage (The Wizard) couldn't save it. That however was the 80's and I hadn't gotten into gaming then. Nintendo enjoyed a prosperous and well deserved place at the top back in the 1990's with the SNES and its Gameboy systems, which gives good reason that they would take some risks, try to cash in on a trend, and then lose.
Nintendo loves to try something new weather its needed or not. Lately they've released the Nintendo DS, a portable with 2 screens, one of them being a touch screen, not to mention N64 graphic and sound capabilities. So far that has been a success, even as currently the Game Cube is eating the dust of the original Xbox and PS2, Nintendo manages to keep afloat with its portable market. But Nintendo can't afford to fuck things up now, drastic moves in the wrong direction will send them into bankruptcy and force them to join the ranks with Atari and Sega as 'failed console companies'. As far as consoles Nintendo only has 1 failure: The Virtual Boy.
In the 1990's Virtual Reality was this buzzword that hit the gaming world by storm and it seemed to have one common element that would make an ordinary game seem like a virtual game: a screen inside a pair of large goggles. If the screen was 2 inches away from your face than you suddenly were IN the game. Games like Doom and Hexen gave us a new genre called the 'first person shooter'. This was a time when people didn't want to just SEE Mario beat king Kuppa they wanted to BE Mario and beat king Kuppa. Trouble is, console makers really didn't know what to do with VR. Sega had a cool VR system in the works but it never made it past the prototype phase. Even the Atari Jaguar had a VR system planned as a cool peripheral. Nintendo ran with this concept and the inventor of the Gameboy, Gunpei Yokoi dreamed up a product.
The VB came out in 1995 and on the outside this thing looked pretty,... interesting. VB looked like a pair of huge googles mounted on the tripod. This device has some interesting hardware inside, such as a 32 bit processor. Another thing that made this thing unique was its ability to play a different set of graphics in each eye creating an illusion of 3d, similar to the effects used to make 3d glasses. The controller was pretty innovative being that it was made to be switchable between left and right handed. Not a horrible idea in all, but it came with one HUGE flaw. Red graphics!
This thing only had 2 colors in its display, red and black. Games like Mario Tennis on this machine gave the impression that our favorite Italian plumber was playing tennis in Hell. Red Mario hitting the red ball to Red Yoshi, under a black sky. That is tennis in Hell, not the usual bright happy place Mario dwells and roams. I could mention other games but honestly this was all I had played. I remember displays of this thing set up at Blockbusters. I was so young at the time and even then I was soooo not impressed. I played about 2 minutes of Mario Tennis before my eyes began to hurt a little. This machine had a manual that was loaded with warnings telling kids to not play this thing for more that an hour and take breaks to rest your eyes. Hmm I wonder just HOW they found out that this thing was dangerous to eyes?
Maybe it was timing, maybe it was lack of software, maybe it was the red screen, or fuck perhaps the fact that after an hour your got a headache while using this thing, truthfully this thing has all this to blame for its failure. The price didn't help either: $169.00. A Game Boy with its green and white screen didn't cost more that $40 at this point in time, and at least that thing didn't cause eye damage unless you played the fucking thing in the dark. Few games were made for this machine. None of them really took advantage of the 'virtual' concept of putting you IN the game, most of the games just showed you a Viewmaster effect, but in motion. In less than a year Nintendo stopped pushing this device and began focusing a little more on the N64. Smart move.
Gunpei was fired after this, which is really a sad loss. The Game Boy he invented was THE system that made the industry rethink of the handheld market as something to take seriously. In 1997 he was killed in a car accident after losing his job at Nintendo.
Was it fate? If it is then that makes the Virtual Boy responsible for murder. The Jaguar sucked, but the worst of that fallout was that a few designers and programmers might have had to go look for another job. Nintendo now has hand helds that rock and all of them are made to the standard that Gunpei had always wanted, for example he had origionally said 'no' to a color version of the Game Boy until technology was made to make the battery life longer. This is one the reasons color game units like the Sega Game Gear didn't hold a great fight against the 'green giant' Game Boy. Gunpei is rumored to have said that the VB wasn't to his liking when it was released and was rushed out too early, and he was absolutely right. A year after his death the Game Boy color came out and the rest is history.
I make trips to antique shops and Goodwills alot. I'm looking for things like this. I don't know why but I love a loser. I can't really explain it. Oh well.
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