The Virtual Boy

The Virtual Boy was Nintendo’s attempt to put a three-dimensional world inside a box on a table. The player leaned into a visor and each eye saw its own red-on-black image, 384 by 224, built from LED technology licensed from Reflection Technology, Inc. The brain fused the two into depth. Gunpei Yokoi, the engineer behind the Game Boy, led the project. The principle was the one the stereoscope had used for a century and a half, with a video game in place of a photograph.

It reached stores in Japan on 21 July 1995 and in North America on 14 August 1995, priced at US$179.95. It did not last. Nintendo stopped selling it in Japan on 22 December 1995 and in North America in August 1996, with about 770,000 units sold worldwide and 22 games released, 14 of them in North America. Yokoi left Nintendo on 15 August 1996 after 31 years. He went on to work on Bandai’s WonderSwan and died in a traffic accident in October 1997. Nintendo’s attention had by then moved to the Nintendo 64.

The device has not come back as hardware, but the name has. On 17 February 2026, Nintendo added Virtual Boy games to Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack in the United States and Canada, playable through a new accessory: a Virtual Boy-shaped holder for a Switch or Switch 2 ($99.99), or a cardboard one ($24.99). No console from 1995 is involved. Thirty years on, the games survive as a subscription extra; the machine that was built to show them does not.