I imagine this has been posted before, but im just curious as to where everyone first ran into VB and became interested.

Back in about 99, I remember being at my friends house where i saw something at the top of his tv shelf. I asked him what it was n he gave me a brief run-down on it. He told me it was a Virtual Boy and that i could try it out if i wanted. So i played Red Alarm for around 30 mins while i heard his parents saying “you pulled that old thing down ?” “you sure didnt play that enough”. I liked it, but i needed more. I played Mario Tennis afterwards, fueling my interest.

I almost forgot about VB until 2003, when i somehow stumbled upon Ferry’s site and began to read up on the console. I then became interested again, buying my 1st unit locally under heavy negative commentary from the staff at the store at which i bought it, claiming it caused eye problems and it was a failure. I simply told the guy that it was what i wanted. I bought it with an AC adapter, Mario Tennis, Red Alarm, Verticle Force, and Wario Land for about 50$ in mint cond. with the games being loose.

To shorten the sad parts, i sold the console and a heavily grown collection in 05 for a little over 400$. Since then, i have bought another VB recently with a few games and plan on waiting for the FlashBoy to be released so that i may pay one price to access the handful of games that were out of reach previously.

Back in 95 when it was released I was interested, but didn’t want to spend the $180, so a friend and I rented the console from Blockbuster and played it a ton, but decided it still wasn’t worth the price. I played it whenever I went to a store that had one on display, but then when they were put on clearance for $25 we both bought the system and all the games we could find (at first we thought we could link them, but even solo it was worth the cheap price). We went to Toys R Us, Blockbuster, Electronics Boutique, KB Toys, etc and bought up all the cheap games from the bargain bins.

It had always been a fun console to me, but I didn’t really get back into it until around 2000 when I started collecting some of the games I hadn’t picked up, and also begain looking into hacking the system. That’s when I really got hooked.

DogP

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. 😛

The first time I ever saw a Virtual Boy was at my (strange) cousin’s house. I found VB Wario Land in a drawer and, to make a long story short, he found his VB and scrounged up some batteries. It had just started up when my parents decided it was time to leave. That was sometime back around ’96? I pretty much forgot about it until later…

A couple of years ago, I saw a VB at Goodwill (a thrift store chain, I don’t know if you have ’em in Europe :-D.) It was only $15. I played Mario’s Tennis for a while and thought it was really cool, but I didn’t like to impulse buy, so I left it. I kicked myself for that later.

Sometime last year, I decided to look up what the heck a Virtual Boy was anyway. I found this site and instantly decided that as a pseudo video game collector I needed to have it. Since then I have accumulated 2 Virtual Boys and a decent selection of games. Still waiting to come across a VUE-Debugger though ;-).

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 😀

it already appears that plenty of people knew of it from the get go. i did remember seeing it around, but i never was curious around 95-96

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…

agreement on Galactic Pinball. definatly was a blast when i had it wayyy back. the game that i am most likely to buy again other than the flash boy definatly…most unwanted again: a tie between golf, baseball, and fishing 🙂

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 😎

I wanted one very bad when it was released, but… it never came to europe 🙁 i was so pissed, i should just have payed the extra cash for a jap one that they offered at the beginning (but i thought we would get a pal one, and didn’t want to get stuck with a jap consol that wouldn’t play any of the games) oh well… so i guess i heard about it in 93 or so for the first time (not really 100% sure about this tho)

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 seriously didnt hear anything about a virtual boy in my time. there was this time when i was real bored so i typed in gameboy into google to see what would come up. i got this article from wikipedia then found out about gunpei yokoi. from there onwards ive found out more about his work including the virtual boy

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.

It was love at first sight for me too. For years I heard bits and pieces about the Virtual Boy but being in Australia it didn’t get much publicity.

As I only got the internet a few years ago I continued the searching for ‘that elusive 3d console’ I heard about as a kid.

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. 🙂

Well, it came out when I was in college. Money was tight, but most Friday’s a few of my friends and I would go out to blockbuster and look for a movie. Well, they would look, and I would play the VB demo that they had set up. I always thought i’d rent one, but never got around to it. The next year…it was gone. I didn’t think that much about it. It didn’t cross my mind to buy one. It was college and I thought it would cost 200 dollars and who new how much for the games.

Well, my wife and I were online last week looking around and came across and article with some odd (hate to say it ugly) tech. And there was a picture of the VB. My wife said something like ‘What the hell is that ?’ and I said ‘OH…wait..I know what that is…it’s pretty cool’. After looking around I found a few web sites. I saw the price wasn’t that bad so, I picked one up from E-bay. Just waiting for it now…it has the blockbuster box, Tennis, Red Alarm, and Teleroboxer. Now, I’m wishing I had the flash cart to try out some games before I buy some more.

-Eric