I have a headache now.

I must have one.

I actually pulled mine out from my closet yesterday. I still had fun with it. I feel like the only person who enjoyed this. I never got a headache from it.

That was a horrible system. I only played it once at an Incredible Universe store (if you could even call it that), but I knew it was horrible even with my limited time with the console. You couldn't see the controls, so you had no idea what to do, and the graphics weren't that great.

@tempestblayze:

I had fun with mine as a kid, mostly because of the Wario game and pinball.

@armchairnixon:

please tell me you're trolling with "you couldn't see the controls, so you had no idea what to do"

I loved it..Wario was awesome (well just Wario)

wasn't it shortly after it came out the blue led came out so that it could have been in color. not sure the specifics, but I swear I remember talks of it that if Nintendo had waited it could have been in color?

i liked my virtual boy :( the wario game was great

guess I should have researched before posting, I was half right, they went with red because it was cheaper, and then in 1996 the lower cost blue and green led came out.

What are you people talking about?! This was the greatest system ever!

I want all of my games to be in red!

I want tripods on my next gen systems!

Without these things, next-gen is lame!

I love how they tout the number of bits. It seems absurd to sell a gaming system to consumers based on the size of its memory registers. The only people that really matters to is developers.

I had one; I only had two games. The packaged Mario Tennis and Wario Land. I loved Wario Land.

omfg 32 bits?!? thats clearly too much system for me...

@Doomstalk:

That was everything back in the day.

Marketing had all of us kids mesmerized by the number of bits.

I still remember those Jaguar commercials with the chalkboard ...

Heh. I remember the only time I actually played a Virtual Boy was at a Toys R Us store when I was young. Played that Wario game, which was okay. I was expecting a lot from it, but I just saw a whole lotta red and yeah...never saw one again.

I still have mine in my attic.

@armchairnixon:

I bet you look at the keyboard while you type don't you?

If it's SO advanced it can't be done on a TV....how the fuck did they manage to get the gameplay into the commercial? I thought they had just said it wasn't possible.

I'm glad I passed on that abortion.

I used to love mine, even though the only games I was good at was Pinball and the Wario. I had Tennis and... Mario Clash? Clash was fun, but I could never beat that damn thing. Guess I had the boxing game too, if I recall...

The thing never really gave me any headaches or whatever, but it was good at making my eyes feel dry. That and the fact I beat half the games I had, and the other half were a sports game, a pinball game, and damn Clash, I did pretty good with the thing. Sadly, I think it was stolen from me at some point, or lost on a trip, as I have never seen the thing since.

Fun games, on an unwieldy system that ate up batteries if I remember right. At least they moved on to the GBA and DS afterwards instead of trying again...

"My god... it's full of stars." Played it, never bought.

Could they please pick a consistent typeface?

I remember that ad!

Yeah, I never got to play one though, guess I didn't miss much. Kinda like the 32X :)

@sadkermit:

Its not in stereoscopic 3d on the commercial, when looking into the virtual boy helmet it is.

Obviously for the commercial they just showed either the left or right eye perspective and left the other one out.

I still dont know what they were thinking with the virtual boy.

Correction, this WAS Nintendo's biggest flop. Mario Tennis was pretty fun though, I remember buying the big red turd from Toys R Us for $130 and being really pissed about my purchase.

@GaijinWarrior:

Um, so whats the new biggest flop?

@brent_w: dude, it was a joke. funny? no. do i care? no.

Arguably their biggest flop? I certainly know which side of the argument I'd take.

This was actually one of the later commercials, early ones were stupid, they'd say "it's so powerful we can't show it to you", which combined with a lack of screenshots on boxes and the only demo in most stores being the single-color line graphics game, made people think the system was only capable of single-color line-grahics. Which is one of the reasons the system failed. Its graphics were actually quite good at the time, particularly for a portable system. It only had one more color than the Gameboy, but it made great use of that, and the higher resolution, larger sprites, etc.

@Doomstalk:
The bits weren't referring to the size of the memory registers, but the size of the data the CPU could process at one time. And in terms of that, going from 16-bits to 32-bits is a HUGE jump in CPU power, because it means you can have up to 65,536 different commands and have them deal with numbers up to 65,535 in one single clock cycle. After 32-bit the jump is far less of an improvement, because who needs more than 65,536 programming commands? Just means you can process larger numbers in a shorter time (and larger numbers aren't needed for much more than memory addresses).

I got one for twenty bucks at kb toys right around when it was officially dead. it later got wizzed on by my cat. everyone's a critic.

@tempestblayze: I liked mine too but I sold it long ago. I bought it not long after the release for a mere $25 dollars at a Wal-Mart haha. Has anyone ever beaten the Ninja in Teleroboxer?

This is one of the few gaming systems I haven't owned, mostly because the 3 or 4 times I played it I though my eyes were being pulled out of my head.

Wario, boxing, and tennis were freaking sweet games. Never really got headaches but I always felt disoriented and sweaty after spending more than an hour playing that game.

@goonface: Teleroboxer, that game was tough at the end but I did beat the robot cat boss. Don't remember which one was the ninja.

@armchairnixon: It was a flop of a console and It certainly had it's faults, but come on! couldn't see the pad? When you are poking the fire do you look at the mantelpiece? I think not!

how this was ever put out on the market i will never know.

Anyone feel they recognize the controller?

No one?

Just thinking about playing that thing gives me a headache.

For all the shit Nintendo gets off of the VB, they still made a profit on it.

It's GREAT doing multiplayer!

Hey man, what are you doing now?
I'm hitting the ball!
Okay how about now?
Oh just returning!

Great Multiplayer times indeed.

The mario tennis and Wario games were the best games I ever played on the VB. I wish there were ports. :|

I'm sure if they could market cheap versions of those goggles that have two mini-screens and VGA jacks, they'd have a sucessful version of this. That and surround sound... Too badass.

Warning: If you still have your VB, remember to dust it off before you stick your head in it. Especially if you have dust allergies. This is from personal experience.

My eyes hurt.

I have to wonder if, as big of a flop as the Virtual Boy was, how it compares to some of Nintendo's pre-video game flops, when they were still trying to diversify away from playing cards and tried everything from a taxi service to instant ramen.

@tempestblayze:
I liked the tennis game and Rad Alarm.

I think it was a failure because it was also a console not made for the public at that time. It´s like releasing a developer tool, or something like that. The idea of VR googles doesn´t works for gaming because of stuff like that. Being nto confortable, hard to learn, giving headaches.. such stuff are nuisances that only people who work on it can handle, like having your eyes sore and your hands achig for working so long. Even this "I can´t see the controls so it´s hard" is a kind of talk like "you must master the shortcuts" kind of logic. Now we have consoles with the "easy to learn hard to master" trand again, thanks god.

@Dreamwriter: I'm not sure I've seen a 32 bit processor where half the word was taken up by the instruction, leaving only half for the immediate value if any. I mean, how would you tell it what register to put the output in?

"Virtual Boy, so advanced, it will melt your brain AFTER ONLY 30 MINUTES!"

If they'd only sold it with a life time subscription to ibuprofen, it'd probably done okay.

I had an opportunity to play one for the first time last year, and I was so excited. About 2 minutes into the game my eyes and head were just aching. I had to stop before even finishing a game of Mario's Tennis! So sad.

i still have mine! i never got a headache from it, and i used to play tennis and wario for hours.

I've always thought the concept for VB was interesting, if only it wasn't so crappy :P

OH MY GOD I USED TO PLAY THIS, MARIO TENNIS FTW.

I remember buying this thing for 30 dollars. I dont know how but I did. What was the going rate?

My eyes hurt.

@vega480:

Nintendo killed the Virtual Boy by being an impatient child ignoring Gunpei Yokoi, forcing him to retreat after it turned out he was right.
The time they should have waited could have be used to improve the whole device, instead the wanted to release it before the N64 came out.

@iamnotdryad: One time, I was driving home, and then it got dark out and I couldn't seen the wheel or the pedals and I didn't know what to do! I died. :(

Does anyone remember this one [www.retrojunk.com] ?

"See", rather. Doh. :|

Ha ha, I only pulled mine out of the closet over Xmas after I bought a UK to US voltage adaptor (I also got it for $30 and made sure I got an A/C adaptor for it). Never had a headache and the games I have are a bit of fun, I'd like to see a port of the Wario game on the virtual console. When in geekier company it is my trump card on how geek I am, a European with a Virtual Boy? Uber-geek

Arguably one of their biggest flops? I don't think it is arguable. It's definitely their biggest flop. I guess the Cube was their second biggest flop but that didn't do all that bad really.

@Dowingba
The gamecube was at least playable and actually was my fav system last generation. I don't hate Super Mario Sunshine mind you :)

I saw a Virtual Boy about 5 years ago with a $20 clearance price sticker I should have picked it up. I remember trying it out at a friends house. You had to have it set up so you can lean over and look into it. That pretty much killed the system right there. They should have did a head strap so everyone could run around wearing those goofy VR headsets.

Also, they fired the guy who came up with the original Gameboy, using him as a scapegoat for the Virtual Boy. I'm not sure if he even had much to do with the VB, but it's a pretty big deal to fire the guy who brought you the wildly popular Gameboy.

And then they killed him. =(

Ah the blindness machine! I think my friend still has his.

If I ever saw one used here in Japan Id so pick it up just to collect for laughs.

VB is good fun. Still play it from time to time.

Worst. System. Ever.

I remember playing that at my friends house a long time ago when it first released. What a piece of shit it was.