Celebration of Miyamoto’s Retirement: Day Five

As we continue our festivities over the retirement of Miyamoto, we come to our fifth reason to celebrate.

Reason Five: Miyamoto was the origin of the Virtual Boy

And Miyamoto reveals he was the origin of the console with this statement:

To start at the beginning, at the time I was interested in virtual reality, and was one of the staff that went on and on about how we should do something with 3D goggles. I didn’t exactly twist his arm, but I would talk with Yokoi-san about how (3D) goggles would be interesting.

The timing of this statement is what is interesting.

Virtual Boy was a DISASTER. That thing just flopped. Nintendo lost so much money. Gunpei Yokoi left the company with everyone thinking Nintendo fired him. For all this time, we are thinking this ingenious creator of the Gameboy, Yokoi, was the architect of the Virtual Boy. And by architect, I mean in the concept and not the technical hardware. Instead, Yokoi drank the ‘Game God Kool-Aid’ and thought Miyamoto was a genius. He paid the price for this mistake with his career.

But something funny happened over the course of many years. Yokoi became respected as a pioneer or visionary because of the Virtual Boy. Whatever faults the Virtual Boy had, it was certainly different.

When the Virtual Boy was seen as nothing but an incompetent disaster, Miyamoto was quiet and allowed everyone to blame the dead guy. But now that the Virtual Boy is seen with more respect and curiosity, Miyamoto now claims credit for it. Does this not illustrate his character?

Nintendo thought the 3DS would be a huge success with everyone gasping at the ‘3d’. It is no surprise to me to see Miyamoto try to interject that he is the origin of the start of the ‘3d’ in gaming. Hilariously, with the 3d aspect of the 3DS being met with disaster by the market, is Miyamoto still going to claim credit for this? Probably not. He will blame it on someone else. Remember everyone, he is a ‘god’.