Virtual buh?

Well, having written that little woodle (Skippy'll explain it in one of his weekly words eventually) you see below, I think I can now officially call myself a webcomic writer. More on that story later.

Have you ever made a really impulsive buy that you know was probably stupid and that you justified with some thin logic like you might be able to turn a profit out of it later? Maybe you haven't, but I have. Today, I bought a Nintendo Virtual Boy for £60, after having bought a copy of Retro Gamer which told me that they tend to sell for around £80. This was enough to convince my parents, with some begging, to return to Gamestation and purchase it.

I have since found that it doesn't appear to work. I'm going to have to see if it's the game or the console by cleaning the game cartridge (a tricky proposition as the connectors are entirely internal and I'll need to open it up to clean it) or getting a new one (pretty useless if it turns out it's the console that's broken). Still, I can always return it so long as I determine if it's working within 28 days, which I intend to do.

Then again, that's not really the point of owning something like this, even for a short time. This is a piece of gaming history, a piece of Nintendo, a company that I am, quite obviously, a fan of, history. Every company has one of these products; it was going to shake up the market, it was going to revitalise and revolutionise the industry, it was going to change the world. But it didn't. It went the way of the 3DO, the Atari Lynx and, a more modern example, the N-Gage. There are plenty of examples in the gaming industry but they're not limited to it. Take a good look at the expression on Steve Jobs face when someone says the word “newton”.

It's nice to just look at it and wonder what could have been. What if those labels warning of possible headaches and blindness didn't need to be so large? What if it had been given a little more development time instead of being pushed out before the N64? What if it had had more third-party support and better marketing?

Would Gunpei Yokoi, creator of the Game Boy and the Virtual Boy, never have been made to leave the company? Could that little change have meant he would be alive today? Would it have changed Nintendo and the gaming industry as we know it?

If Nintendo were to release it today, would Sony have copied it by tomorrow?

Wild speculation and all incredibly unlikely but in an era when “innovation” is a buzzword nearly synonymous with the technology industry as a whole, it's fun to speculate about what could have been.

I suppose two of my three posts thus far have been pretty videogame-related but so are most of the things that I do. And it's probably a good thing, come to think of it. After all, 2 out of 3 ain't bad.


Image: Error messages like this are why I switched to using a Mac.