Argonaut Software founder Jez San has been speaking about a hardware project he worked on with Nintendo that could have given the games industry affordable and effective home VR decades before the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive came along.
San had previously spoken to Eurogamer about the 'Super Visor' in 2013, when he said:
We had built a Virtual Reality gaming system for them called Super Visor that would've been awesome, but instead they canned our project - which was full colour, had head tracking and 3D texture mapping - and released the ill-fated Virtual Boy in its place.
The UK gaming legend - who founded Argonaut in his teens and would later work with Nintendo on Star Fox and the Super FX chip - has now shed a little more light on the failed project in an interview with Metro:
I worked on a VR machine called the Super Visor for Nintendo, but unfortunately, we fell out. A guy called Mr Gunpei Yokoi cancelled our project in favour of the Virtual Boy, which we used to call the Virtual Dog because it was so bad. He made a bet in the wrong direction, cancelled our project and his one was awful. It was a bad decision.
We had full colour and head tracking at a time where no-one else did, but the Super Visor was cancelled in favour of a system with no head tracking and red graphics. It was like the Vive headset that’s on sale today but made 20 years earlier. Of course, it wasn’t quite as good because the Vive has better screens now, but our’s was made a long time ago. We almost finished the Super Visor and it was cancelled to do the Virtual Boy, which was a shame. VR gaming could have happened 20 years ago if they had kept us on.
San added that Nintendo - and Hasbro, which was later offered the tech when Nintendo had passed on it - were perhaps reluctant to release the unit because of the health issues it threw up:
To use VR you have to wear some dorky thing. You look like a fool wearing it. Also, it’s unsafe because your eyes are covered and you can’t see what’s happening in the real world, so you might slice your hand on a knife or fall down some stairs. Nintendo and Hasbro both shied away from doing VR systems because of product liability laws which meant they could get sued for gazillions if someone hurt themselves whilst wearing it.
They were very consumer-friendly companies that didn’t want to be sued for anything, so we had to wait 20 years for Facebook to have the guts to buy Oculus and say – perhaps thought naively – that it can do VR without getting sued.
Would San's Super Visor have given VR the exposure and success it so badly needed back in the '90s? After a brief period of fame - thanks to the work of UK firm Virtuality and movies like The Lawnmower Man - VR all but vanished from public view until very recently. We'll never know if San's concept would have been good enough back in the mid-'90s to have prevented this slump, but we imagine it would have been more impressive than the Virtual Boy Nintendo eventually released.
[source metro.co.uk]
Comments 30
There's way more to the Virtual Boy being picked over seemingly superior tech at the time than just them being nepotistic. It all had to do with overambition.
While I don't doubt it would have been superior to the VB, I'm not sure that Nintendo could have successfully maintained the N64, the Game Boy, continue work on the 64DD and GameCube (both of which were delayed), not to mention the GBA, and on top of all that have a whole other system to maintain.
The 90s VR attempt failing was a bit of a blessing in disguise, unlike the 64DD which should have been shelved after '97.
Twenty years ago I also developed an autonomous electric car almost like Tesla nowadays, only a little bit uglier (because now they have a better design), but Ford pulled out the plug and went with the Escort Sedan instead. Unfortunatelly I have no prototype to show, so you guys have to trust my word...
Yeah, it was around 20 years ago. But it was terrible, extremely low poly stuff. I'm pretty sure I tried something at Cedar Point around then. And it wasn't good.
you have to admit nintendo were way ahead of their time back then if they had developed with this idea, even with the VB they were still ahead.
After getting rejected by Nintendo, they could have sold the invention to either Sega or Sony and maybe done something interesting with it. I guess with the failure Virtual Boy though taking risk with VR at that time was a bit difficult but they still could had try.
I feel like the 90's were the absolute high point for the "video games cause violence" debate. If kids had been able to play games like the original Doom in VR back in the day, I shutter to think of the backlash the gaming industry might've seen, so perhaps it was ultimately for the best. I feel like those kinds of claims about violence have significantly died off nowadays, though.
@ReaderRagfish Same, I've tried it and it makes me feel sick. I know people say you get used to it. But it also takes a bit to set up and I prefer to just pick up and play like on the switch or on other consoles.
There's way more to the creation of the Virtual Boy than most people realize, most of it having to do with sheer coincidence on the part of how Nintendo came across the technology, combined with Yokoi's famous design philosophy of "lateral thinking with withered technology". This article is one of the best I've read: https://www.fastcompany.com/3050016/unraveling-the-enigma-of-nintendos-virtual-boy-20-years-later
A lot of the unfortunate design limitations of the Virtual Boy were intended to offset safety and usability concerns inherent with VR that are still being addressed today (how to make it portable without people killing themselves, how to make head tracking work so people don't want to throw up). To say that anyone could have created a workable VR technology that was safe, economical and suitable for mass home use back in the early 1990s is pretty naive.
@VexingInsanity you only have to set it up once and then you are good to go, it's not that difficult, but i still like traditional gaming but i also love VR too, i can't wait to see what sony has up it sleeve with PSVR in the future.
@DrJiggle that is what i was thinking actually regarding the VB they intentionally designed it the way they did to restrict movement and reduce accidents and i guess i was right.
He seems to be still piss with Nintendo.
Argonaut also made a 3D Yoshi game for the N64 back in 1995 (before Mario 64). Nintendo declined, and they made Croc instead.
Well, having been a teenager 20 years ago I played on a few virtual reality arcade cabinets & watched a lot of TV where virtual reality was pushed as the next big thing... then it all went the way of the 3D TV.
The real thing that amuses me is that virtual reality was MUCH more hyped & found it's way into comics, cartoons, game shows, music and almost every facet of our lives & yet it died out as just another gimmick. Virtual reality at the moment is struggling to make money and is already seen as a fad?
So what is Jez actually boasting about? He could have killed VR faster and taken some of Nintendo's credibility with it?
@Octane Sorry, I just parsed that. So Nintendo declined on a Yoshi game for the N64, so Argonaut turned it into Croc: Legend of the Gobbos for the Playstation?
To be honest, having played Croc Nintendo made the right decision. Unlike Nintendo telling Square they couldn't have a larger cartridge for Final Fantasy 7 & losing the franchise for a decade or two...
@DanteSolablood Yeah, pretty much. Keep in mind that it was one of the first platformers, so it hasn't aged very well, though it's still playable.
@Octane I do have fond memories of playing Croc at the time, though I think it suffered from being released the same year as classics like Turok, Tomb Raider 2, Crash 2 & not too long before Sonic Adventure on the Dreamcast.
how garbage was it that they went for the virtua boy did we really make that instead
Good article.
@huyi Oh I agree its a really good format and I'm interested to see how it develops. Just whenever I've seen anyone use it, there's a bit of messing about before hand. And then there's the issue of space. But each to their own.
"Super Visor"
Wow.
I need the radical setup in the pic. Think of how totally tubular the other kids will think i am. Righteous.
Some things are just too ahead of their time, I think a "powerglove" type thing for the Switch might actually work, the games and the hardware have finally caught up to the idea
LABO suggests such an interface would not be unrealistic
Dang, Nintendo!
The 3D effect on my 3DS console crippled my sight. Just like while watching the 3D screen, my eyes started behaving like that in real life: focusing on slightly different points and not at the same point anymore.
And there's no remedy, no surgery to correct it. I will have to live like that for the rest of my life.
Technologies based on fooling our sensory organs are damaging.
Maybe not for everyone and not for the same effect but I surely won't touch VR.
I tried it once. I immediately felt how awful it was for my eyes.
My sight is much more important than such gimmicks.
It was better than Virtual Boy? Well thats not very hard. Would it still suck? Yeah, i def believe so! Good thing it didn't come out!
It sounds like it would have been really neat. Better than the VB at least. As someone who recently picked up an Oculus Go, I'm very optimistic for the future of VR. Mobile VR is the future of VR. I'd love to see what Nintendo could do with it. Hopefully Switch 2 will be VR ready. For now, I'll just have to settle for my VB emulator on my oculus.
VR sux. Pure novelty value, that's all.
@setezerocinco Haha exactly! I mean if it was so impressive, why sit on it for 20 years? He could have approached other conpanies such as Sega Sony or many others. Seems he just wants his moment of fame on the headlines.
Interesting story.
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