Best of ND 2013: Top Ten: Nintendo Blunders

Nintendo is king here at the Dojo, but it’s not all chuckola cola and mushroom pops at the house of N.

By Kyle England. Posted 12/24/2013 09:00 3 Comments     ShareThis

2. The Virtual Boy

A failed console is a pretty big blunder, and Nintendo failed spectacularly with the Virtual Boy. The red-tinted, half-console, half-portable device was supposed to bring us to the next level of three-dimensional gaming. All it brought us to was the next level of headaches and disappointment. Honestly, I have a bit of a soft spot for the red thing, but it was a huge failure.

The Virtual Boy was introduced at a very strange time, very close to the end of the SNES and launch of the N64. It was was quite expensive for the time and only played games in one color. It was also awkward to play and set up, and the 3D effect wasn’t really all that great. I personally own a Virtual Boy and I can tell you there is really only one or two games worth playing on it. The appeal just wasn’t there, and soon after launch Nintendo had a dead console on its hands.

What’s probably the most saddening thing about the Virtual Boy is that its creator, the gaming visionary Gunpei Yokoi, was driven to quit Nintendo after its failure. Yokoi did find some success in making another handheld, but he sadly died in 1997. Who knows what he could have done if he had stayed at Nintendo?

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