Virtual Boy
This is a little foreboding if you’re looking at virtual reality headsets and thinking “Yeah I bet those are cool”. Luckily for the upcoming Oculus, Morpheus, even the oddly titled Vive, the Virtual boy had to deal with some pretty painful technological limitations way back in 1994. At the time, both Sega and Nintendo were stuck behind a 16-bit wall they simply could get past. The market was stalling and both companies were looking to whatever could plug the earnings gap until the 32 bit era arrived, itself signing the assassination note for Sega.
Nintendo’s attempt to bolster their lack of growth came from the Virtual boy. This was a piece of technology was incredibly ahead of its time when you look at things like VR headsets and Smartwatches that fill our world today. Back then though, it was nothing more than a disaster. The uncomfortable grey plastic mounting forced you to stick your face into the designated groove while you gripped a controller in your hand to play the game, all the while having the wire holding both pieces together try to strangle you.
Using a red-tinted display which showed two-dimensional images in a way to create the illusion of 3D using a parallax with mostly wire-frame graphical elements, the Virtual Boy finds its way into this list of consoles we’re glad died because the technology was too young then to achieve anything. If the Virtual Boy had been a success, we’d have seen high-resolution textures on TV screens replaced with wire-frame images for many years to come. Not to mention that if anyone actually wanted to create a full-color display it would have cost more than a small car to buy one.
The Virtual Boy’s death was a quick and almost painless one. Nintendo lost money hand over fist with the console, releasing the device in Summer 1995 only to discontinue the Virtual Boy on the 2nd of March 1996.
