Platform: Virtual Boy
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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:
"It was the kind of toy to get you excited and make you think, 'This is what we can do now!' […] as just a fun toy, it's a big success if you break just 50,000 […] [Its] sales generated some buzz, and crossed 100,000, then 200,000, then 500,000-quite a good pattern […] [But] when you think of it as a gaming platform, it becomes a failure."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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A Full color 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 a red-only display.