Platform: Virtual Boy

In a 2011 Iwata Asks interview, Shigeru Miyamoto expressed discontent at the Virtual Boy being marketed as a video game console. He believed it was simply a novelty toy and that it succeeded in that field despite its commercial failure as a game console:

In an interview with Metro, Jeremy 'Jez' San of Argonaut Software fame revealed he helped design a virtual reality gaming system named the "Super Visor" for Nintendo, but the system was ultimately cancelled in favour of the Virtual Boy.

Early iterations of the Virtual Boy also included a gun that could be set on a flat surface, which would project a 3D hologram-like image into the air.

The original prototype for the Virtual Boy was blue and was actually supposed to be worn on the player's head like goggles. It had a screen/pad on the controller, the purpose of which is unknown.

Even though there was an expansion port for two-player modes, the cable that made this possible was never released due to the fact that the system was discontinued so quickly.

The Virtual Boy came to be through an exclusive agreement between Nintendo and the Massachusetts-based company Reflection Technology, Inc., who had developed a monochrome red LED eyepiece display called Scanned Linear Array. General manager Gunpei Yokoi kept the red LEDs while developing the console instead of using a full-color LCD display for several reasons. Both companies claimed color LCDs would have been prohibitively more expensive, retailing at $500 ($1000 when adjusted for inflation in 2023), and tests of the displays were said to have caused visual glitches such as "jumpy images" and players "[seeing] double" instead of seeing depth. Yokoi preferred red LEDs as they were the cheapest option and used a more recognizable color, and unlike a backlit color LCD, he believed the contrasting black color could add a more immersive sense of depth.

It should be noted that a full-color LED Virtual Boy was impossible to release in 1995 due to the fact that high-efficiency blue and green LEDs only became available in 1996. The Virtual Boy, which uses an oscillating mirror to transform a 1-D line of dots to a 2-D field of dots, requires high-performance LEDs in order to function correctly. Without the high-efficiency blue and green LEDs, the Virtual Boy was limited to the red LED display.