Virtual Boy - Reception

Reception

Reviews of the console tended to praise its novelty, but question its ultimate purpose and longtime viability. The Los Angeles Times described gameplay as being "at once familiar and strange." The column praised the quality of motion and immersive graphics, but considered the hardware itself tedious to use and non-portable. A later column by the same reviewer found the system to be somewhat asocial, although it held out hope for the console's future.

While Nintendo had promised a virtual reality experience, the monochrome display limited the Virtual Boy's potential for immersion. Reviewers often considered the 3-dimensional features a gimmick, added to games that were essentially 2-dimensional or even 1-dimensional. Yokoi, the system's inventor, noted the system's strengths with action and puzzle games, although those types of games provided only minimal immersion. Multiple critics lamented the absence of head-tracking in the Virtual Boy hardware. Critics found that, as a result, players were unable to immerse themselves in the game worlds of Virtual Boy games. Instead, they interacted with the fictional worlds in the manner of any traditional 2-dimensional game. The Washington Post felt that, even when a game gives the impression of 3-dimensionality, it suffers from "hollow vector graphics." The Virtual Boy failed for a number of reasons, among them "its high price, the discomfort caused by play and what was widely judged to have been a poorly handled marketing campaign."

Many reviewers complained of painful and frustrating physiological symptoms when playing the Virtual Boy. Bill Frischling, writing for The Washington Post, experienced "dizziness, nausea and headaches." Reviewers attributed the problems to both the monochromatic display and uncomfortable ergonomics.

Nintendo, in the years after Virtual Boy's demise, has been frank about its failure. Howard Lincoln, chairman of Nintendo of America, said flatly that the Virtual Boy "just failed."