There is even a HUGE conspiracy theory about this, that Yamauchi put a price on his head over this fiasco and the resulting Wonderswan. I don't know whether said conspiracy theory is even legitimate, but I have heard it several times. Yokoi was a genius, though, and largely responsible for many of the staples of gaming, so it was a rather ungrateful result that they forced him to resign.
Funny but, this question makes me wonder if a Virtualboy cart adapter is possible with the 3DS. It will likley need some hardware to function, but would be neat to see.
I'm thinking it'll be much easier once the 3DS is "Homebrewed" to have a Virtual Boy emulator that runs ROMs from SD cards. That will be ace, let me tell you.
The 3DS isn't going to die out. Nintendo has room to drop the price on the system which would definitely move units and the new Mario games will be coming. People are just impatient that they bought the system already and they want the games they bought it for to be out NOW. But it doesn't work that way. That's why you don't buy a system on potential but on what you know you can get right then or maybe within a couple months.
The first time i saw a Virtual Boy was in a Wal-Mart kiosk. No one ever used it, so I played it a bit. I'm not kidding when I say that kids my age were all the time at the Nintendo 64 kiosk playing Mario 64, located next to it. There was no time limit for using either. Can't remember the price here, but some time later I saw a big stack of them in a Toys R Us in Texas for 15 dollars each. I do remember the ads in comic books anouncing the price drop to 99 dollars, I tought that was very quick. It is my understanding that not even developers wanted to use the Virtual Boy, but Nintendo may have said to them that if they wanted to be in the "Dream Team" of N64, they had to commit to a game or two for the VB. Something I always found interesting: the Virtual Boy tech was not created by Nintendo, but by an american developer that tried to sell it to Sega first (and I think Mattel before that). Sega's rejection was one of the few smart moves they did at the time.
Sega dabbled in 3D as well. There were a few 3D Master System games and a set of glasses used to play them.
Oh, Nintendo... the never remember their failure at the cave... and what about these easy-to-follow assembly instructions? This is the original Nintendo 3D product that came and went and nobody noticed.
From Kotaku: "In August 1995 the Virtual Boy was released for $180. After lackluster software support and complaints of headaches the system was dropped to $160 in October of 1995, only two months after launch. In May 1996, only seven months after the first price drop, Nintendo cut the Virtual Boy to $100. By the end of the year the console was discontinued."
Man did they dodge a bullet with that one! My guess it that that was the VR helmet for the Genesis, the one with the crappy mode7 graphics in that old CES video
In most cases, the piece of crap stand broke while you were playing it, and the Virtual Boy fell off the table. One dead Virtual Boy
Mine stopped working suddenly. One of the eyes lagged and showed garbage lines. I stored it to have it fixed when I found someone who could fix it. Two years later, I took it out and it worked flawlessly. I have a Zombie Virtual Boy.
just last year I saw one such virtual boy on sale with like 8 games bundled with it for 10 bucks at a thrift shop in montreal(was the same place I later saw a first-gen japanese megadrive, go figure), and I was about to buy it when I noticed that its stand was broken. because when I buy consoles, it's less to collect them and more to play the fuck out of them, so seeing this gave me doubts, and I skipped on it. as for the japanese mega drive, I only learnt it was one a few months ago while browsing wikipedia. *headdesks*
If the games are the ones that I think they are (Panic Bomberman, Red Alert, Mario Tennish and V-Tetris) it's overpriced. You can pick up similar boxed VB sets for 10-15000yen on Yahoo. I'd love to get one... it's one of the purchases that I postpone all the time, but I've been interested in the system since 2004 or so. Played it for the first & last time in 2007, but still no VB in sight What about that (rental?) one particular box variation with the black&white mosaic Virtual Boy on the front? Has it gotten any rarer over the last few years? I don't see it as often for sale on YAJ as I used to.
I know it's waaaaay overpriced. I think my new in box one was around $100 about a year ago. This one does come with Mario Clash and Space Squash, but still...
