Everyone has their own opinion of Virtual Boy. And here's mine: It's a good system. It's not the greatest system ever made and it's certainly not the worst.
Nintendo's Virtual Boy system was released in August 1995 with the game Mario's Tennis. Also with the launch were two other games (also by Nintendo): Galactic Pinball and Teleroboxer. Following the release of the system, Nintendo sold eight more games, until March 1996. Kemco sold one game. Ocean sold one game. And Atlus sold one game. From August 1995 until the last game was released (March 1996), the Virtual Boy only lasted seven months. Therefore, Nintendo decided to have a relaunch of the system with games such as Dragon Hopper, Bound High, and Zero Racers coming out with the system (Mario's Tennis was still the pack-in game). However, once August 1996 rolled around, Nintendo decided not to have a relaunch of the system and decided to cancel the three games, plus others, that were almost completed and ready for release. Companies such as Ocean, THQ, Bandai, and Rare (yes, Rare) were going to release games for Virtual Boy, but since Nintendo cancelled ALL games, we'll never see any of the games, ever. And now it's August 1997, two years after the Virtual Boy system was first released. Many people have made Virtual Boy pages on the internet, Nintendo doesn't allow any game "help" in its magazine Nintendo Power, anymore. Stores are liquidating Virtual Boy's and Virtual Boy games. And within the next half year, someone who has never heard of Virtual Boy will probably never hear about it, ever. Well, there's the history lesson for you. Now onto math (Ha,Ha). The main reason Nintendo's Virtual Boy system failed was: the lack of games. First of all, you need a company to make the games. Well, there were only six companies: Nintendo, T&E Soft, Hudson Soft, Ocean, Kemco, and Atlus. Not enough companies, obviously. Second, you need companies willing to sell the games. Nintendo ended up selling most of the games. The rest were sold by Ocean, Kemco, and Atlus. There weren't enough kinds of games:
The games that were going to be released were of these kinds:
Four games came out in Japan that didn't come out here in America. They are V-Tetris, Virtual Fishing (well, at least someone got it), Space Squash, and In Mouse's House. Games that were going to be released in Japan, but never were, include the following:
If anyone has any information on any of these Japanese games, e-mail me at "kylenin@angelfire.com". I know this is a long editorial, but I want to say what I wanted to say about Virtual Boy. Little tidbits of information (about Virtual Boy games) include the following:
Is that enough facts for you? One more thing I'd like to add before I finish. Waterworld, which is known as the worst game for Virtual Boy, is a 16-megabit game. One question for Ocean, if the developers of this game are reading this: Where was all that 16-megabit memory used in the game? In my opinion, it could have had 4 megabits of memory and still would have been as good (or bad), as it was. Ocean really wasted money and time on this game. |