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Here in Europe, not many people have heard of Gunpei Yokoi's invention, the Virtual Boy. It came out in 1995 and featured high-resolution 3D graphics, using colour light emitting diode technology. It was first released in Japan and the U.S.A. with plans to release it eventually all over the world. It seemed to be a natural progression from the Game Boy, and a lot of the games are 3D conversions of classic Game Boy games. They even came in similar boxes. Unfortunately it was a disaster for Nintendo and there were 2 reasons for it: One, the consumers were not ready for a game console that only had red and black graphics and two as Nintendo was busy releasing its Nintendo 64, it didn't have the full support of the company and, Miyamoto (One of Nintendo's main games designer, see History section) was too busy creating Nintendo 64 games. This meant the console was doomed and it sold poorly in both the USA and Japan, hence no worldwide release. Gunpei had taken it on as his baby and was hugely disappointed, when Nintendo didn't give it its full support. Many people agree, that this was the main reason for Gunpei to leave Nintendo and set up his own company, Koto (They created the Bandai Wonderswan). The initial price for the unit was $149, but was later dropped to $99 and then to $29. The good thing for collectors is that this console will be worth a fortune in a few years, and a lot of games that were never sold in shops are very hard to come by.
Patent nr: 5682171 Processor: NEC V810 (uPD70732) 32bit RISC 20mHz Clock speed / 18MIPS Display: RTI Reflection Technology Inc SLA (P4) 384x224 resolution (4
colour with 32 levels of Intensity) 50.2Hz h-scan
Value: VB shop display: $810 (14th Sep 2004)
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