Love at first sight ?

I first heard about it all the way back in 1996, when I was only nine years old. I didn’t pay much attention to it at the moment, however, because me and my brother were hyped up about the upcoming Nintendo 64 (something I’d later realize that the VB suffered from a LOT; being in the shadow of the N64). It went out of sight and out of mind until 7 months ago, when I saw videos about the games on YouTube, and people’s videotaped reviews of how it works and the games that went with it. It sounded even more interesting than the Game Boy (to me, anyway), so I looked around on the internet for more information about this console (which is how I found Planet Virtual Boy). As a result of all this research, I finally decided to invest in one for my upcoming 21st birthday. So you could say PVB helped me make my final decision. 😛

I first saw the VB when I was 9 years old on a british game show called Bad Influence. They were playing Teleroboxer and I was amazed at how futuristic it looked and immediately wanted one, but Nintendo didn’t bring it out over here so I eventually forgot about it. Then in 2005 I was bored and decided to look up crap on ebay, and eventually typed in virtual boy. It was literally the happiest day of my life when it came in the mail 😀

I remember when the Virtual Boy was released… I may have been overly influenced by the Gaming Press at the time, but I was heavily into console gaming and felt the the VB was doomed from the get go, so I never even played one; just wrote it off as a failed experiment… I flirted with the idea of buying one when they were finally being blown out of retailers across the country, but decided I would be better off using the money fro something else…

Anyway, flash forward ten years and I’m putting a handheld video game collection together with my son… We’ve gathered all the usual hardware and stuff over the years, and we decided to put a display together and create a guide-booklet that would have a brief essay about each system in it. Doing the research on the Wonderswan and Game Boy for that booklet, we learned about Gunpey Yokoi, and by extension, the Virtual Boy. After discussing the ins and outs of adding the Virtual Boy, we decided that it deserved a place in our collection by virtue of its designer, and the fact that it runs on batteries, contains its own integrated display and speakers, and was touted as being “portable” to some degree… And so now we’ve got one – it just arrived in the mail today – and I’ve been playing Cosmic Pinball and Mario Tennis and really enjoying it! I’m a big fan video pinball, and the tables in this game are a blast! I especially enjoy Colony so far…

Back in the summer of 1997, my parents and I booked a trip to the U.S. which included going to Disneyworld – Orlando and then to New York. When in New York, we went into a Toys r Us and there I saw the Virtual Boy at $29.95 and each game at $9.95. Since I had only read a brief piece of news (10 lines or so) about Virtual Boy in a Spanish magazine, I thought owning a cheap 3D console and games which weren’t available in Spain was way too cool to be true, so I bought everything I found for Virtual Boy in that week, running through all the videogame shops in New York.

The worst experience was finding the f@ck1ng AC adaptor. I went into EVERY single shop in New York (Manhattan area), and when I finally thought I had lost all the chances of finding one, I went into an electronics shop beside the hotel in which they had THE LAST one in stock, so I bought it (for $39.95, 25% more than the console!).

Then I got back to Spain and started searching for games in import shops, but I could only find one which had games for it. Unfortunately, I wasn’t interested in collecting the games at that time, so I thought that paying $50 for Insmouse or Space Squash was way too expensive after seeing that games were at $10 each (silly me, I paid 3-4 times more for those games years later!). Afterwards, I began collecting Virtual Boy things (mainly games) by buying in eBay auctions (much secure then than now, by the way…).

And now here I am, trying to increase my collection day after day and learning from good and bad experiences in the process 😎

Me and my brother rented one from Blockbuster back in ’96 I believe. We got Teleroboxer, Red Alarm, and Galactic Pinball. Needless to say we feel in love despite all the negative press. Unfortunately I never touched one again…but thats all about to change. Today I won one on Ebay. It is coming with the AC Adapter and Tap, Mario’s Tennis (U), and Teleroboxer (U). I also purchased a Mario’s Tennis (J), Panic Bomber (J), and Virtual League Baseball (U).

I must have been the only one who actually anticipated the release of VB and bought it on launch day.

I remember constantly reading about it in Nintendo Power. I was a huge Nintendo fan, so I knew I had to buy it. With the Ultra 64 having been delayed a year, I used the money I had been saving for Ultra 64 to buy VB.

I remember going to Electronics Boutique on VB’s launch day and being the only one there to buy one. I was expecting VB to be this amazing, immersive, virtual experience and was slightly disappointed when I brought it home and found the 3D effects to be not nearly as awesome as they had been in my imagination. But as I played through Mario’s Tennis, I realized that despite the fact that the 3D effect weren’t like virtual reality, they were still pretty cool.

My launch unit stopped working (it had that problem where one eye wasn’t displaying properly) and have since had to buy 2 more Virtual Boy units. Hopefully this one won’t break.

I wanted one when they first came out and I tried the store demo but they were expensive. Then in late 96 my local store had the entire stock on clearance sale. VB unit new for only 30 dollars. In the few months, I was able to get all 14 games new mostly from Toys R us when they marked the games as low as $3 each plus the AC tap and a 3rd party carry case. I figure I spent less than $100 on the set.

I still own the set. 🙂