Moreover, its red monochrome displays were criticized for giving players eye strain, nausea, and headaches during gameplay. There was no head tracking, motion controllers, or even games that wouldn’t have played equally as well on a standard Gameboy. Note: Every time someone refers to Virtual Boy as a VR headset, or pretends to wear it like one in a YouTube thumbnail, I scream into an empty paint bucket, hoping the residual fumes will calm my nerves. Besides relying on some objectively useless stereoscopy, being shaped like a headset, and having ‘Virtual’ in the name, that’s where the comparisons between it and virtual reality stop. Timed right at the peak of the ’90s VR craze, Nintendo released what essentially was no more than a 3D version of Gameboy though-a 32-bit tabletop standalone console that just so happened to have stereoscopic displays, making it no more a VR headset than Nintendo 3DS. When they don’t, we get Virtual Boy.Īccounts hold that Yokoi was rushed to finish up work on Virtual Boy so the company could focus on the launch of Nintendo 64, which is partially why it failed. When Nintendo sticks to its principles, we usually get a DS, Switch, Gameboy, Wii, Game Boy Advance, 3DS, NES, SNES, Game & Watch, Nintendo 64-10 of the top 20 bestselling video game platforms in history. Meta Reportedly in Talks With Tencent to Bring Quest to China Virtual Boy Failure, Labo VR Experiment In short, Nintendo is really good at serving people with what they’re already used to and baking in novelty that owners can engage with or equally ignore. Since the success of Wii, it’s also been about creating new types of games centered around novel input schemes, like how the Wiimote lets you bowl in Wii Sports, or how Joy-Cons let you grove on-the-go in Just Dance. For Nintendo console owners across the years, it’s more about being able to play games from a host of recognizable franchises such as Mario, Zelda, Smash Bros, Pokémon, Pikmin, and Animal Crossing. Nintendo consoles don’t tend to focus on cutting-edge specs either (as any former Wii owners can attest). That’s basically been the case from Game & Watch all the way to Switch and Switch Lite.Īnd it’s not just handhelds though. His philosophy, mentioned in his Japan-only book ‘Gunpei Yokoi Game Hall’ (横井軍平ゲーム館), sums up the sort of thinking that vaulted Nintendo to the world stage Yokoi coined the phrase “lateral thinking with withered technology,” outlining the company’s strategy of using mature technology which is both cheap and well understood, and then finding novel and fun ways of applying it to games. Yokoi’s career at Nintendo spanned 31 years, covering its transformation from the then nearly century-old Japanese playing card company to worldwide video gaming powerhouse. His last project before leaving the company in 1996: Virtual Boy. Among many other accomplishments, Yokoi is credited with designing Gameboy, creating the D-pad, and producing both Metroid and Kid Icarus. Yokoi is credited with designing Nintendo’s first handheld, Game & Watch, which at its 1980 launch made use of the cheap and abundant liquid crystal displays and 4-bit microcontrollers initially conceived for calculators. Much of Nintendo’s market strategy can be attributed to Gunpei Yokoi, the prolific Nintendo designer best known for pioneering the company’s handheld segment. Lateral Thinking with ‘Withered’ Technology Over the years, Nintendo has also become increasingly reliant on big singular projects which, while not always exactly cutting-edge, have allowed it to comfortably exist outside of the PlayStation and Xbox binary. In short, the reason Nintendo hasn’t made a real VR platform like Meta Quest has a lot to do with risk aversion, since the company generally prefers to wait until technologies are more mature and have proven market potential. Or rather, no and kind of (in that order).
Didn’t Nintendo have that Virtual Boy thing in the ’90s? And what about Labo VR for Switch? Those were VR headsets, right? Yes, and no. Ok, it’s more complicated than that, but it’s a good starting point to understand why Nintendo hasn’t made a proper VR headset yet, and probably won’t for some time yet to come.
Nintendo basically has a singular MO, and it does it well: create broadly accessible hardware to serve as a vehicle for its exclusive swath of family friendly games. Having seen how far the technology has come though, it raises a question: why hasn’t Nintendo made a VR headset yet? The rumor is still unconfirmed, but when the world’s oldest extant gaming company finally thinks it’s time to make a dedicated XR device, you know it’s going to be something special. There’s a rumor going around that Nintendo is making a VR headset in partnership with Google.
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