![]() Despite Nintendo's best efforts, extended use caused eye strain.The most inexpensive color combo turned out to be red LEDs against a black background, even though it made even the most lighthearted games look like Nightmare on Elm Street. The reason for this was two-fold: a full-color display would have shot the price north of $500 (for perspective, the Nintendo 64 launched two years later at $200), and there were once again motion sickness issues that came about when testing color LED displays, so monochrome was the best option. The graphics were an unappealing black and red.Considering that it was marketed as a portable system, being stuck with a device that necessitated sitting or laying in an uncomfortable position in order to play it didn't make for a great first impression. It was intended to be a head-worn system with motion tracking, but ongoing concerns about motion sickness and Japanese safety regulations meant that it became more of a stereoscopic 3D system instead, with the goggle design being converted to the unappealing tabletop form-factor of the final product. ![]() Many of the things that would have made the system an actual VR headset had to be removed either due to cost or safety concerns.So what happened to suddenly make virtual reality so unappealing to everyone for an entire decade? There are probably a few reasons, but Nintendo's foray into the market with the Virtual Boy likely didn't help. ![]() And it wasn't as though such attempts were completely unsuccessful: the same year that the Virtual Boy released gave us the $700 Forte VFX1, which functioned well enough given the tech at the time. It seemed like the natural evolution of the medium would have us fully immersed in 3D gaming spaces, and many companies tried their hand at creating VR headsets and the like. ![]() In the 1990s, the possibilities of virtual reality gaming was beginning to manifest right alongside the industry-wise Video Game 3D Leap. It was the brainchild of Gunpei Yokoi, father of the Game Boy and co-creator of the Metroid series. It remains the company's most notorious hardware failure, comparable to Sega's tumorous 32X. thing from Nintendo released in the summer of 1995 in Japan and North America. ![]()
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