Virtual Boy - Legacy

Legacy

The commercial demise of the Virtual Boy was considered to be the catalyst that led to Yokoi being driven from Nintendo. Nevertheless, The New York Times maintained that Yokoi kept a close relationship with Nintendo despite Yokoi having later created a rival handheld system for Bandai. According to Game Over, the company laid the blame for the machine's faults directly on the creator.

Although considered a failure in the traditional sense, the Virtual Boy did little to alter Nintendo's development approach and focus on innovation. If anything, it encouraged a more open-ended metric for success than finances or sales.

Because Nintendo only shipped 770,000 Virtual Boy units worldwide, it is considered a valuable collector's item.

During the lead-in to the release of Nintendo's 3DS, Shigeru Miyamoto discussed what he felt were the issues with the Virtual Boy. One was the actual use of the three dimensional effects - while it was designed to render wireframe graphics, it was generally used to separate two-dimensional games into different planes separated by depth. Further, Miyamoto stated that the graphics were not as appealing, and while developing the Nintendo 64, had ruled out the use of wireframe graphics as too sparse to draw players. Finally, he stated that he perceived the Virtual Boy as a novelty that should not have used the Nintendo license so prominently.

As of 2007, Virtual Boy still has software being developed by the homebrew community at Planet Virtual Boy forums, with the first ever Flash cartridge designed by Richard Hutchinson for purchase, the "FlashBoy" (フラッシュ ボーイ - FurasshuBōi). The Flashboy has since been updated to have save features in the FlashBoy+ which is currently available for purchase as of 2012. While the console itself failed in many regards, its focus on peripherals and haptic technology reemerged in later years. The hope of developing a virtual reality gaming platform has considerably outlived the Virtual Boy itself.