Life is short, I want to be happy, and other reasons to love Virtual Boy.

There are several valid reasons why Virtual Boy failed commercially. It was expensive. People don’t like having things attached to their faces. The words “Virtual Boy” sound weird when we think about them, in the same way that reading or speaking the word “orange” over and over eventually looks and sounds alien and dumb.

Orange. Orange.

Orange. Orange. Orange.

And, of course, there’s the headaches.

Contemporary reviews of Virtual Boy and the many dozens of retrospectives from today’s YouTubers (which certainly harvest and ape those early reviews to a great extent because who, besides me, really owns a Virtual Boy) all exclaim(ed) loud and annoyingly that Virtual Boy was and remains a machine designed primarily for the purpose of making headaches.

Virtual Boy entered my life in 1995 when I was eleven years old. A longtime Nintendo Power subscriber, I compulsively feasted on the magazine’s Virtual Boy preview issue for months, until Christmas morning finally delivered the beautiful red future to my gaping retinal maw. I played it endlessly then, and I still do, for a few hours every month. In thirty years of use, it has never induced a single headache. Furthermore, my eye doctor assures me that it played no role in the rapid deterioration of my eyesight, which shifted from perfect 20/20 vision in 1994 to virtual blindness beyond six feet in 1996.

What conclusion may we draw from such diametrically opposed experiences? Only one; that the supposed headache havers are boring liars, weak of eye and brain.

More to the point, Virtual Boy has enough excellent games to make owning and playing one worth any quantity of mythological headaches.

Red Alarm is one of the most beautiful electronic anythings I’ve ever experienced. This wire frame, low-FPS, proto-3D flight rail shooter is Star Fox for people who know how to read. When I played it in 1995 I thought “This is what the inside of a computer looks like. I’m living in the future.” And when I play it now I think, sadly, “No one will ever make anything this interesting again.”

Wario’s best 2D platformer appears on the system. Virtual Boy WarioLand is fast, punchy, hilarious and challenging, with a 3D depth mechanic that was incredible in its day and remains inspired today. It has phenomenal boss battles and a soundtrack by the legendary Kazumi Totaka. There’s literally nothing to detract from the game except that people found it easy to whine about the color red.

Jack Bros. is a remarkably well-crafted 3D dungeon crawler by the people who make Persona, and the first Megami Tensei game to release outside of Japan. People who direct games at Atlus still talk about it today (when I make them), and if you bought the game new in 1995 you could sell it tomorrow for a profit of $1,550.00. In this economy?

Mario Tennis is simply great. Teleroboxer is a cyberpunk Punch-Out!!. V-Tetris is 32-bit Tetris Effect and has the eighth-best and second-classiest box art that’s ever been printed for a video game.

All of these games are dope as hell.

I don’t know how else to say it, nor how to convince you. Indeed, I don’t know how to convince anyone it seems, because whenever I pitch an article to magazines about how the Virtual Boy is ackshually good, editors lose my number. But it is. It’s actually good.

It’s called flight.

I get it. It’s easier to sit upon a stack of established opinions and poo poo the silly things. It’s fun to laugh at Virtual Boy’s off-putting name and repeat for the thousandth time the dead-ass wrong factoid that Gunpei Yokoi, the visionary designer who made Nintendo billions of dollars with his Game Boy, was fired after the failure of the Virtual Boy which he designed (I debunked this myth myself in an interview with Gail Tilden, former Vice President of Brand Management at Nintendo). It’s easy to whine about headaches and scoff at a library of games totaling just 22 (of which just 14 came to the USA).

But to do so is self-limiting and predictable and dull.

You know what’s better than that? Liking weird shit. Being a weird shit enjoyer.

Take Panic’s Playdate, for example. Now there’s a modern-day Virtual Boy if ever there was one (complimentary). It’s a cloyingly cute yellow square with a delightful, anodized aluminum hand crank, a catalog of built-in and downloadable games from young devs like Diego Garcia (Casual Birder) plus astonishing gems from established legends such as Katamari Damacy’s Keita Takahashi (Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure). [FYI, Keita Takahashi told me he made this game just to see if he could make something super difficult - what he called a “From Software” game.]

Photo by the author. Don’t look at it. It’s mine.

The Playdate too is a monochrome, offbeat, mostly ignored machine. Like the Virtual Boy, I love it and play it more than I do my Switch.

By the way, are you mad that the Switch 2 only comes in charcoal grey? Because you should be. What happened to weird tech? The Walkman Bean, colorful translucent iMacs, and the Sony Sound Burger? And remember third party controllers for the Nintendo 64 which had a turbo switch and a screen-printed graphic on one of the three(!) handles that radically shouted Maximum Impact!?

Holy shit. All of that was cool as hell. Just like Virtual Boy. And if you don’t think so, I have bad news; you’re boring. If you don’t wake up your next computer’s going to be a space grey MacBook and you’re gonna die a virgin (metaphorically).

I can break it down pretty simply.

Life is short.

I want to be happy.

This is why I love Virtual Boy. ∎