Virtual Boy retrospective: Aheadache of its time | Virtual Boy Works #00 

What happened to Yokoi and this system was simply tragic. Many thanks for keeping this great piece of history for future generations.

I bought one of these from a Blockbuster Video for $40! It came in a hard plastic briefcase and they gave me 10 games. Everyone I showed it to couldn’t stop laughing. It was such an otherworldly item. I still chuckle thinking about it. On a side note Wario Land was the best thing this oddity had going. 🤣

it probably would have taken effort, but Nintendo should have re-released the library on the 3DS..I mean it c'mon! There's some gems in this small library.

I still can't believe they didn't release a Virtual Boy Collection on the 3DS. M2-developed like the Sega stuff, with custom color palettes and 3D of course. Even the aspect ratio is similar.

I half-expected Jeremy to try and cram in a "Wonderswan song" joke when referring to the Virtual Boy being Yokoi's last Nintendo project.

WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL MY LIFE? I absolutely love the Virtual Boy for some reason. I bought mine new at Toys R Us on the cheap after it was disco'd. It was just so different. I just ordered some replacement stand parts on ebay a few days ago. It's great to see some love for this system. Thank you!

Come on Nintedo! Labo VR plus Nintendo Switch Online Virtual Boy rereleases. Make it happen!

That 'Boy' in the name really hurt it, and it kind of shows in the company's future products. Branding the DS with a new name vs. calling it 'Game Boy DS' so they could bail if necessary, then again with distinguishing the Switch as a portable system separate from DS in case it didn't work out. It's a shame they pinned so much on Virtual Boy and had to cut its lifetime to tragically short. Great wrap-up video! Looking forward to the book when it's ready.

"In hindsight the platform feels like some sort of video game Galapagos: small, self-contained, cut off from the rest of the medium. It's full of evolutionary dead ends and strange one-offs that feel completely unknown to the larger world." What a fantastic analogy!

A fun thing about the footage you got of Gunpei Yokoi is the interviewer seems to be Gustavo “Gus” Rodriguez, who ran a popular games show on the 90s named “Nintendo Mania” until year 2000, he was also the head editor of the official Nintendo magazine of Latin America “Club Nintendo”, which name preceded the consumer loyalty program.

Bet it feels so good to finish a console!

Thanks for going through this series. The entire Works series is a true labor of love.

This series has been a real accomplishment. Thanks for your awesome work-your retro gaming videos are the gold standard!

I hope Jeremy will do an episode on Bound High. It's a strong contender for best Virtual Boy game, even going toe to toe with VB Wario Land and Jack Bros. Also, Planet Virtual Boy and the continued Virtual Boy homebrew is totally worth highlighting.

The Virtual Boy despite being marketed as a system with 3D capabilities is possible the peak of 2D Video Games. Thank you for this great retrospective on the console, it actually convinced me to buy one.

Great video as usual! And I hope we get a WonderSwan Works because that handheld sounds fascinating!

Jeremy Parish: A gift to the gaming world and a national treasure!

Congratulations and thank you! Keep up the wonderful work and insightful commentary!

Excellent series. Thank you for showing us all such a comprehensive perspective on a... perhaps misunderstood... rung on the Nintendo evolutionary ladder.

just stumbled upon your channel, and i'm blown away. your videos are well-produced, well-researched, entertaining, informative, etc. i seriously hope your channel grows, you deserve it. i subbed up, and hopefully many others do, too.

Great job as always. If Nintendo released all the Virtual Boy games on 3ds I would buy all of them.

My only encounter in the "wild" with a Virtual Boy was one set up at Blockbuster Video with Wario Land. It was interesting, but trying to figure out a dual pad control scheme with my face shoved into a big ass headset was confusing at best. Then it vanished almost without a trace or anyone speaking of it for years. Nintendo Power basically acted like it never existed, and other game magazines followed their lead. It has been fun exploring it's small library via emulation, almost an quarter century later.

Great way to wrap up your Virtual Boy coverage!

A great finish to an awesome series. Thanks for the videos. My desire to try out a Virtual Boy is even stronger now

Amazingly detailed video! Love the Animal Crossing clip with the Virtual Boy in-game since I was thinking of that and the 3DS Mii hat, as references. Great work!

I always thought that labo VR would be the perfect excuse to reintroducing the virtual boy library, I can only call it a missed opportunity

I'd love a collection of Virtual Boy titles. Mario Clash is still fun. Sad to see how Nintendo treated Mr. Yokoi for this failure, an absolute disgrace on their part and I have never seen any indication that it bothered them in the slightest.

It's definitely a pretty neat piece of hardware. And I personally find the eyestrain thing to be not as big of a deal as people make it out to be if you follow the instructions on how to use the two knobs on top of the unit.

My friend and I played the Virtual Boy at a Nintendo trailer during some county fair back in the mid 90s. Hate to say it, but as die-hard SNES fans, we were sorely disappointed. And we both ended up with headaches after 10 minutes!

I remember seeing them at a local Blockbuster store and then they were just gone. Really different looking back at it now.

So well spoken sir, thank you for all of your quality content...

These videos are so relaxing 😌

ooh I love magic eye images - this one looks like some penguins lol. Great episode, lots of awesome information as usual!

Ah, _Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy_ … a game that compares unfavourably to a lot of earlier Amiga games… and to a lot of contemporary Macintosh *shareware* games

Gimmick or no, that penguin 3d magic eye poster is sick!

Oh yay, I enjoyed the Game Boy/NES ones, eager to see this VB system review

Those are some nice penguins in the magic eye image!

1:53 There is Gus Rodriguez from the tv show Nintendomania and Club Nintendo Magazine in Mexico, both distributed along Latin America.

Luigi's mansion 3 references the virtual boy heavily, with the entire menu system being based around it. it's pretty cool

-11:42-- Yet Robotron 2084 is a twin-stick shooter from 1982, and it was pretty dang popular.- Never mind, someone already mentioned that.

I own a Virtual Boy since 1996. Have few games for it, 8 in total, but love them all. Maybe the system was released too soon, maybe it could have been smaller, lighter and in color a few years later. Really sad was the death of Gunpei Yokoi in 1997.

The Virtual Boy was kind of rushed to a fault, so that's why the Virtual Boy wasn't taken very seriously. I just didn't like the red coloring the original console had, but seeing it with gray-and-black made the games look much better. Despite the bad lifespan it got, it had its fair share of great games. I felt sorry for Gunpei Yokoi dying less than a month after his 56th birthday. Fun Fact: The final console Gunpei Yokoi made was the Game Boy Pocket. It was made as an apology for letting players down with the Virtual Boy.

i think you might as well quit now, because you're not gonna come up with a more clever title than that again

Rich of ReviewTechUSA has brought me here and you know what, I'll subscribe and also I liked this Virtual Boy video, nice stuff.

There's a VirtualBoy emulator for PC VR headsets, VBJin. You can play games in grayscale and it's way easier on the eyes in modern VR headsets.

Yeah, VR tech to this day results in one of the most common complaints being 'it's too expensive!' That's in spite of the fact that we have standalone VR systems now in the same price range as game consoles... And even the PC based rigs allow a functional setup for $2-3000, which is in line with gaming PC prices in general, with the headset being a decent, but not overwhelming fraction of that price. (high end monitors are similar in price.) It's worth remembering that prior to Oculus upending the market we had some previous VR hardware in the consumer space at a similar price - Vusix had been making them for well over a decade. The problem with Vusix's stuff is it pretty much sucked. 30 degree field of view or less. Terribly low resolutions. (640x480 was the 'high end' resolution), plus framerates and head tracking were quite poor. However, what Oculus did essentially amounts to finding a 'cheap' way to bring decent quality VR to life - it's comparable in quality to headsets in the $10-20,000 range at the time it released. So what is this sudden increase in quality at a reduced price based on? Mobile phones. No. Really. While specially optimised screens were used in the final consumer headsets, ultimately the availability of high performance, small LCD displays is largely related to the explosive growth in mobile phones. The display in the Oculus Rift DK1 is an off the shelf display intended for 8 inch tablet computers. And while the final consumer version has a pair of special-purpose displays, they still ultimately benefited from phone LCD tech. And the other half of the story is MEMS accelerometers and gyroscopes. The Wii made these famous, but again their most widespread use is in mobile phones. Though their origin as a technology appears to be car airbags. Even so, if we were to ask a hypothetical question about this - let's say a company was VERY determined to make a VR setup? When could they have realistically done so at a price that was plausible as a consumer product? Well, the 90's wasn't it. Based on my own memory of technologies involved and some history of what the current headsets are based around... I'd say about 2001, 2002 it would've been possible at gaming PC kind of prices. And around the time the Wii was launched, something on the level of the Virtual boy may just about have been plausible. (2005/2006). So basically , the virtual boy is an idea that is about a decade ahead of the technology required to make it work. Too bad nobody wanted to try again. Least of all Nintendo... On the other hand, if they had thought this through a bit more carefully, they might've gotten away with this a little better if they had tried to make Virtual boy a home system - moved the processing out of the headset, making the headset lighter, and into say a belt worn device. Or, dumped it entirely as an independent system, and made it an accessory for the n64, since that would've seen a vast jump in processing power. Of course, accessories tend to not sell very well, so that likely still would've failed. But it would almost certainly have done better than this standalone device did.

Great summary Jeremy! Totally want to one of these just to play wario land!

Warioland VB still looks great, even in monochrome. Its a crime that hasnt been ported, just add color. Even as is, Id be happy with.

WonderSwan Works confirmed!!

"Aheadache of its time" :) Jeremy is the real king of the retro videogame joke.

I’ll never forget the line from the Virtual Boy Waterworld manual-don’t shoot until you see the white in their eyes. There’s no white on VB…

It's was how I would describe, too ahead of it's time. The tech wasn't quite ready for it

This was worth it for the Lawnmower Man footage alone

The right-Dpad camera control you allude to was only used in the replay mode.

If only they knew that the Gameboy had one massive ace still up its sleeve.

11:42 twin stick shooters existed way before. Smash TV is a huge example of that.

1:56 Gus Rodriguez footage! that was from Nintendo Mania Mexico!!!

Let’s get a Virtual Boy Classic from Nintendo with full library of games and a head strap.

In hindsight, I Wish I could've invested in this system when it was marked down to $20 back then. But I was rightfully disgusted by the thing when it was new. But as a collector, I wouldn't mind getting one, but since NOW everybody and their cousin wants it, it's difficult to do so. Kind of makes me wonder if Nintendo has a secret warehouse full of unsold units...

The guy interviewing yokoi is Gus, from nintendomania, a long lost mexican program from the 90s.

would you do the game.com? it is pretty much never covered,and like the VB it had some major innovations as well as some crippling limitations. would be really interesting to see you talk about it :)

I got penguins for the hidden image on the Magic Eye. Anyone else get the same?

You kept saying "vastly more powerful", but that's actually a bit of a misnomer. Yes, the Game Boy had a green four shade screen. But *power* wise it actually held its own rather well, with a 4mhz processor clocked higher than both the Game Gear (3.5mhz) and the NES (1.79mhz). It was that screen that colored the public's perception!

I recently got an Oculus Quest. And of course. One of the first things I sideloaded was a Virtualboy Emulator.. with 6dof headtracking it is surprisingly playable. :D

3:20 el buen Gus Rodriguez!

I got a virtual boy with box and a complete in box copy of panic bomber, wario land, and jack bros.

Anyone else pause the video to admire the penguins in the magic eye?

What made me real sad about Yokoi's passing was that some assholes on the internet tried spreading a rumor that he had killed himself out of depression over the Virtual Boy's failure. I had heard those rumors long before hearing what actually happened. The man was a genius, and the Virtual Boy was simply a misstep. As you said, he went on to help develop the WonderSwan, which I remember being a fairly successful product. I also think the Virtual Boy could have done much better if they had just lost the red tint. You mention the red tint is the last part of the rendering process, so they could very well have just been full-on greyscale. Sure, greyscale is a bit bland to look at, but the red tint just makes my eyes hurt even while watching captured "flattened" footage.

My biggest gaming regret is selling my Virtual Boy. Someone offered me $200 for it when they were going for $80-100, and as a retro-game addicted teen I felt I needed the money to be able to buy other games I could actually play more then 20 minutes (it gave me really bad migraines)

"Look, a sailboat!"

I would pay good money for a virtual boy collection on Switch. It could easily use the Labo VR set.

Oh dude!!! Are you going to review all the games?! U beat me to the punch!!! I eventually want to do that too!!!! Oh bwaby! I can't wait to see what you have in store!!! Great stuff.

I can see penguins and one of them is in a hole with water, i love those 3D images!!

...so for the finale to Gunpei Yokoi's lineage, are we going to get Wonderswan Works now?

Wait, Yokoi was planning to retire all along? The story a lot of people liked to push was that he was shamed into retiring by getting the 'dreaded corner office' after the failure of the VB. Is that all exaggeration?

I feel like a jackass. When I was a kid, after the Virtual Boy was cancelled, I bought one from a used game store for like $40. But I hated playing it and I returned it a few days later. Should've kept the damned thing. I bought R.O.B. as a display piece, why not the Virtual Boy? Now it'd cost me probably a few hundred bucks to get one, and it wouldn't be in such good shape.

You mean Awesome Magic Eye posters! I mean, the one you chose isn't the best, but I guess Penguins are pretty cool. Definitely not a sailboat.

TL;DW: All hail the Virtual Boy

You've got your description of parallax backwards. You can easily demonstrate this point by holding a finger up near your face and closing one eye then the other. The CLOSER it is to your face, the further it appears to move as you look at it with each eye. The further an object is away from you, the more similar it's image appears on each eye. 'Infinite distance' is basically definable as the point past which objects no longer appear to have any difference at all when seen from multiple viewpoints... So, your description is back to front.

The 3DS was the perfect platform for Virtual Boy game ports. I'm baffled why Nintendo didn't do this.

1:52 YOOO Nintendomanía!

When you described the image separation and foreground/background effect, isn't that reverted from how it works, at least in real life? If an object is far away, the image on each eye are close to each other, since the difference of position between the object and each eye is small relative to the overall distance. When an object is close, the image on each eye differs more, since the difference of position between the object and each eye is bigger relative to the overall distance.

I did read somewhere that Nintendo chose red LED's as they used less power than any other colour as well.

Can someone explain to me what the context of the Akira footage is?

Why Yamauchi San, Yokoi San and Miyamoto San and any of the people capable of making the decisions all agreed that the Virtua Boy was somehow a "good idea" is a similar mystery of how Sega Enterprises Japan allowed themselves to be convinced by the Sega of America 32X presentations and proposals, they just should have evaluated this further and simply rejected it before ever reaching production stage and all those resources should have been placed behind the Nintendo Ultra 64 which ended up becoming the Nintendo 64 in the process much like how Sega should have rejected 32X and only focused on development of Project Saturn without Sega of America's staff interference. The main issue here is that Nintendo of America had no involvement with the Virtua Boy... it was just a "not well thought out idea" that never should have gone beyond some concept... that way Nintendo would have avoided wasting whatever millions of dollars they spent on Virtua Boy and instead the most ideal situation would have been Yokoi San developing a light gun for the N64 because that was one of the genres of games missing significantly on Super NES and N64 and that way the N64 would have had at least half as much more software even if it ended up being 3d only graphics games which was another flaw of N64 mostly having 3d games only.

3:15 I can *something* I just don't know what the hell it's supposed to be!

Talking about Yokoi's death followed mere seconds later by the mournful ending jingle is some serious bathos.

is Virtual Boy works going to be published on print too?

YOOOO!!! I just noticed that GameBoy game at 3:35 ! Name please!

One good run of dumb luck in finding and well undervalued pricing or gimme after another since late January I got back into the Virtual Boy, and as of now 13/14 games (I have Jack Bros), 2 repops, and V-Tetris not to mention more goodies as most my stuff is complete, and have the BB case too with the manual in fantastic shape, even have some spare stuff. It's quirky, it's fun, it's different, but still very similar as this episode covered well. It gets and got a lot of undeserved crap, and even too late after the fact was shown it was smears and fears when it came to so called harm. It's tragic it wasn't given at least a full yet let alone two to get some solid titles finished up and more released to see if it would be viable even at a reduced rate.

it's penguins! it's penguins!!

What a NoMad??

I'm still salty Nintendo never rereleased these games on 3DS. What a glaringly obvious missed opportunity. It would've been the easiest, most convenient way to experience these games in true 3D, bar none.

Fun fact: private eye is the name of a satirical newspaper here in the UK. Probably where the company got the name from.

I think a lot of people forget that both Gunpei Yokoi and Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi spent most of their careers selling toys rather than video games. Toys need unique features in order to appeal to their young target market, and they're also very hit-and-miss, which I think explains Yokoi's obsession with hardware gimmicks as well as Yamauchi's sometimes surprising tolerance for unsuccessful experimentation. Yamauchi had picked Yokoi out of the assembly line to be a designer, and I imagine the failure of the Virtual Boy must have been a very bitter blow to him as well as Yokoi. Gunpei Yokoi's influence at Nintendo is something I really miss when I look at the company today. Nintendo has very few tech-heads who like to tinker for the sheer love of tinkering, and they're so much less experimental today than they were even a decade ago. The one guy they have left who's like that is Genyo Takeda, who helped design the Wii, but he hasn't been a major influence at Nintendo for a long time. I was hoping he would be tapped to run the company after Satoru Iwata died; instead Nintendo chose a Pokemon Company alumnus who worked in marketing...twice. We certainly have come a long way from the quirky, feast-or-famine Nintendo of the '90s.

Many make the VB out to be tragic end of Yokoi's career but in reality his last console was the Pocket like you mentioned and his last game was Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War on the SNES, a cult classic in the west and the best selling FE in Japan till Awakening. Not a bad way to go out if you ask me.

What killed the Virtual Boy was the bad battery life, using red instead of gray or white for normal black and the other colors, plus bad audience appeal.

11:42 Jack Bros isn't the first game to do the twin stick shooter thing. There's some old arcade games, like Robotron, that did it over a decade before Jack Bros. Also, if we're talking just consoles, Smash TV on the NES allows for use of two controllers so you can use the controllers d-pads like twin sticks before Jack Bros also.

Those of us who are fortunate enough to have an Oculus Quest VR headset can play these games as intended by way of a fan made emulator. Not only that, but you can display the graphics in green and black or blue and black if the original red is too unappealing. Isn't technology wonderful?

I don't understand why they don't make virtual boy games available for Labo VR. sure it would be niche, but it would get people talking, and would be really appreciated by people who love the history of gaming. hell, it might even sell a few Labo VR sets!