Seeing Red

The tragic prescience of Nintendo’s Virtual Boy

Written by Jon Irwin

Fifteen stones sit on islands of moss, submerged in a lake of gravel. This is Ryoan-ji, a rock garden in northwest Kyoto, and a sacred place of meditation and worship. Translated, the name means “temple of the dragon at peace”. The formation is a national treasure. Some call this simple arrangement of stones by an unknown gardener one of Japan’s highest cultural accomplishments. Here is the trick, the nifty sleight-of-hand that earned such lavish praise: Only 14 stones are visible from a single vantage; as one moves into view, another fades away. To see the 15th stone, the legends say, you must first achieve enlightenment.

An hour south, in a large white building overlooking a rice paddy, Nintendo’s architects of play dream up new toys.

“Sometimes a company develops something so nifty that it takes a while before anyone figures out how to use it effectively.” So begins an article published in the August 1990 issue of Popular Mechanics, titled “A New Way to See.” The company was Reflection Technology, then located in Waltham, Mass.; the “something so nifty” was a miniature display device, invented two years prior, that uses a single column of red LEDs, a magnifying lens, and a swinging mirror to create an image of “vibrant red