Virtual Boy
The failure that carries his name may be the one thing he argued against.
Virtual Boy went on sale in Japan on July 21, 1995 for ¥15,000, and in North America three weeks later for $179.95. It showed everything in red — a choice attributed to Gunpei Yokoi for the same reason engineers give for traffic lights: red is easy to see, and it does not drain the battery. Nintendo stopped making it in Japan five months later. Around 770,000 were sold worldwide.
About a year after the launch, Yokoi left Nintendo after thirty-one years, and the story wrote itself: the man who built the company's biggest flop had been shown the door. Nintendo has publicly called the timing coincidental. Yokoi himself is said to have explained it more plainly — that he had long meant to strike out on his own at fifty-five, and that he had used up a lifetime's worth of ideas.
And according to David Sheff's Game Over, the machine he is blamed for was not the machine he wanted. Nintendo, the account goes, was pulling its people toward the Nintendo 64, and the Virtual Boy was pushed out in a shrunken, compromised form that Yokoi had not intended to release at all.
He is said to have argued against releasing it. It shipped anyway. His name is the one still attached to it.
Virtual Boy — at a glance
- Released
- July 21, 1995 (Japan) · August 14, 1995 (North America)
- Launch price
- US$179.95
- CPU
- NEC V810 RISC, 20MHz
- Memory
- 1MB DRAM · 512KB PSRAM
- Display
- Two 384×224 single-colour red LED arrays, viewed through a stereoscopic visor
- Power
- Six AA batteries (removable pack) or a mains adapter
- Library
- 22 games (19 in Japan · 14 in North America, with overlap)
- Units sold
- About 770,000 worldwide (regional split disputed across sources)
- Discontinued
- Japan: December 1995 · North America: 1996
What actually happened
Virtual Boy ran on an NEC V810 RISC processor at 20MHz, with 1MB of DRAM and 512KB of PSRAM, driving two 384×224 monochrome red LED displays to produce a stereoscopic image. It launched in Japan on July 21, 1995 for ¥15,000, and in North America on August 14, 1995 for $179.95.
Sales fell away quickly. Nintendo ended production in Japan on December 22, 1995 — roughly five months after launch — and in North America during 1996. Only 22 games were released across both regions. Lifetime sales are generally reported at around 770,000 units worldwide, though the regional breakdown differs between sources.
On August 15, 1996, Gunpei Yokoi left Nintendo after thirty-one years. He had run R&D1, the division behind the Game & Watch, the Game Boy and the cross-shaped D-pad. He founded a company called Koto with several former members of his team.
Withered technology — and the machine that tested it
Yokoi is remembered for "lateral thinking with withered technology" — taking mature, cheap, well-understood parts and finding a new use for them. Whether the Virtual Boy was that idea in practice, or the one time the idea got away from him, is the question this machine leaves behind.
Five things about the Virtual Boy
- The red-only display is usually explained the way engineers explain stop lights: red is cheap to light, easy on batteries, and hard to miss. A colour screen was explored and reportedly would have pushed the price past $500.
- Every Virtual Boy game shipped with a setting that pauses play at intervals to make you stop and rest. Accounts differ on the exact interval, but the feature itself is well documented — the machine was built knowing it asked a lot of your eyes.
- The console's famous fault has nothing to do with the red display. The ribbon cables joining the screens to the main board were held on with glue rather than solder, and it is the glue that fails.
- The removable AA battery pack and the official mains adapter — both in the box when it was new — are now harder to find in working order than the console itself.
- According to David Sheff's Game Over, Nintendo pushed the machine out in its final, scaled-down form so it could move resources to the Nintendo 64 — reportedly against Yokoi's own wishes.
The man behind it
- Gunpei Yokoi — the engineer who made the Game Boy and the D-pad
- Yokoi's Last Morning
- A Quiet Light
- WonderSwan — the handheld he never saw released
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