that had crashed through the wall of Montparnasse station in Paris. On top of the cabinet is a red plastic pair of goggles atop a black stand, a demo unit he says he rescued from the wreckage. Later, he’ll say it looks like “an ugly spider.” But first he places the device on the table. I sit down, stick my face into a foam visor, and soon I’m floating in a red-and-black cosmos, soaring through the stars.

This is a trade-show demo called Space Pinball, a rudimentary version of what would become a launch title for the Virtual Boy. In its final release, Galactic Pinball, the titular object is more of a disc, and every time it nears the flipper it inexplicably slows down, making awkward, unaligned shots the norm. In the demo, the action is much faster and more realistic than the retail version’s. The playfield is littered with floating pyramids, rotating stars, and rings arcing up into the player’s vision. Everything looks so smooth, oddly vibrant. I understand how investors and developers alike could become smitten with the device’s potential.

Wells sits down across from me, my face still planted in the machine. “When [Nintendo] did the deal, nobody thought it would fail,” he says. Reflection received $5 million for exclusive rights to its display, and $10 million in upfront royalties. They waited to take the company public until after the Christmas ’95 season. This decision proved to be disastrous.

Fred Bamber was on the Board of Directors throughout Reflection’s entire run. Had they gone public after the announcement, Bamber explains, but before the product’s launch in August ’95, they might have raised another 50 million. Founder and CEO Al Becker thought the launch would prove so successful that to go public early would mean leaving money on the table. Bamber, a good friend of Becker’s, conceded. Such patience often reaps great benefits in the digital world. (In 1998 Bamber became an original investor in E Ink, whose technology is now used in the Kindle and other eReaders.) So they took a risk and waited.

Then came the Virtual Boy’s stillbirth at retail. Going public in the wake of such poor sales would benefit no one. Instead, Reflection raised around 10 million via private auction—a fraction of their initial estimates. Meanwhile, Wells worked on a new version of their screen display using red, green, and blue LEDS to create full-color images. They flew to Japan and pitched it to Nintendo. “They politely sat through the demo,” Wells told me. “I remember this dinner where we went out to a very lovely restaurant, very fancy restaurant, and they said, ‘No, you guys don’t get it. This thing has died.’ I don’t remember what they said, but that’s what I took away. ‘It’s very lovely what you’ve done. But we’re not interested…. This thing’s dead. Let’s move on.’”

The lack of funds and the failure of its follow-up project (a portable fax-viewer/modem that enabled on-the-go full-screen messages long before smartphones) forced Reflection Technology to close its doors in September 1996, just over a year after the Virtual Boy’s launch in America. The original team scattered. Wells started his optics-testing company. Goldschlag became involved with Veterans for Peace. Al Becker, visionary leader and founder of Reflection Technology, kept on trying to solve problems, working with Ovation on a sewage-filtering system to help bring clean water to third-world countries. He died unexpectedly in 2002, the failure of Virtual Boy a distant memory.

Failure, though, is a relative term. An estimated 800,000 systems were sold. If you’re a toy manufacturer, that’s like hitting the lottery. If you’re Nintendo, arguably the most successful videogame maker on the planet, that’s a big