Sergey Galyonkin from Raleigh, USA on Wikimedia
Consult any list of Nintendo's worst releases—heck, any list of the worst consoles from any franchise—and you'll see one name repeated over and over again: the Virtual Boy. Billed as the future of gaming, this stereoscopic console was a literal pain in the neck for fans. In case you don't remember this infamous flop, let us give you a primer.
The Virtual Boy holds a special, if shameful, distinction among Nintendo products. Excluding special editions, it's the only console to be launched and discontinued in the same calendar year. That's right, the Virtual Boy was launched in July 1995 and discontinued in December, just five months later.
The last few V-Boys lingered on shelves for a few months longer like a fungus. It was also Nintendo's worst performer by a huge margin, selling only 770,000 units. By contrast, the next worst-selling console, the Wii U looks like a roaring success with 13.6 million units sold.
An Expensive Motion Sickness Simulator
All this is to say that you probably didn't get a chance to experience the horrors of the Virtual Boy unless you were up to date on all the latest tech or had a friend with rich parents. The console had an immediate
Some failures turn into cult classics. The Game Boy Color, for example, had a relatively short life and an irritating lack of backlighting; yet, it is remembered as a unique console with excellent games. The same cannot be said of the Virtual Boy.
Billed as a stereoscopic console, the Virtual Boy was an early foray into the world of virtual reality. While VR isn't anything special in 2025, it was unexplored territory in 1995. Nintendo, always on the cutting edge of technology, noticed interest in VR and saw a potential market.
It would be easy to say that the technology simply wasn't there for the Virtual Boy to succeed, While this is true, it was only half the problem. The Virtual Boy wasn't just limited by VR technology in its infancy, every aspect of it seemed designed to aggravate players.
Starting with its design, the Virtual Boy was ugly inside and out. The headset was too heavy to wear by itself, so you had to attach it to a cheap stand to keep from breaking your neck. This meant that you had to hunch over to play; IGN compared it to seeing games through a periscope.
Adding insult to literal injury—this thing was heavy—were the abysmal graphics. As with today, the screen was only a few inches from your eyes. For some unfathomable reason, Nintendo decided that two-tone red and black graphics were the way to go.
The result was low-quality and, quite literally, hellish. Not only did the games look absolutely awful, all that infrared lighting going directly into your eyeballs couldn't have been good. The Virtual Boy made people sick—literally.
Almost everyone who used this console reported headaches and nausea from a combination of the graphics and the weight of the headset. There were even studies suggesting that the Virtual Boy could cause brain damage! At $179.99, it was a very expensive motion sickness inducer.
Nobody wanted to play something that made them sick. In addition, Nintendo failed to live up to its own promises when a wearable harness was teased but never released. The man responsible for the Virtual Boy left the company shortly after the game's release.
Back From The Dead
It's impossible to write any sort of thinkpiece retrospectives on how the Virtual Boy was good, actually, because it simply wasn't. It was flopped for a reason and everyone understood why. It just sucked!
And yet, this hasn't stopped Nintendo from repeatedly capitalizing on its own failure. Both Tomodochi Life and Luigi's Mansion 3 make reference to the Virtual Boy, its hype, and its utter failure. This would be charming if it weren't so obvious that the megacorp has a V-Boy-shaped chip on its shoulder.
What's more is that the Virtual Boy is back from the dead! In September 2025, Nintendo announced the re-release of 14 Virtual Boy games. Not only are the games coming back, but the console is as well.
At this point, it's unclear whether the console will be a more lightweight (but still neck-straining) version of the original headset, or a cardboard model. Additionally, Nintendo has not specified whether the games themselves will be remastered to be less nausea-inducing. We will have to wait until February 2026 to see.
