Virtual Boy sold roughly 770,000k units.

Read those numbers again.

The 32X, an optional add-on released late in the Genesis lifecycle, sold approximately as many units as Nintendo’s heavily promoted standalone 32-bit “virtual reality” machine. The 32X even sold nearly 500,000 units in America by its first Christmas. It was not rejected on arrival. People wanted it. Sega simply stopped feeding it because the industry transition accelerated and Saturn took priority.

Virtual Boy launched later, cost more, displayed everything in red, required the player to hunch over an optometrist’s torture device, could not deliver the color graphics people associated with 32-bit gaming, had twenty-two games worldwide, failed to reach even one million sales and was quietly dragged behind Nintendo headquarters and shot.

Yet listen to the retro establishment.

The 32X was a catastrophic betrayal.

The 32X confused the market.

The 32X killed consumer confidence.

The 32X killed Saturn.

The 32X killed Dreamcast.

The 32X killed Sega.

The 32X presumably killed arcade gaming, the American department store and my parents’ marriage.

Virtual Boy?

Fascinating.

Experimental.

Ahead of its time.

A bold miscalculation.

A tragic chapter in the career of Gunpei Yokoi.

Fuck off.

It was a worse commercial failure by every reasonable standard. Nintendo built an entire independent machine, advertised “virtual immersion,” put demonstration kiosks everywhere, worked with Blockbuster to shove the thing onto the public and still sold fewer units than Sega’s funny plastic mushroom.

The 32X was not even trying to establish a new hardware dynasty. It was a bridge product. An upgrade. You already owned the Genesis. You inserted the 32X and got better versions of Virtua Racing, After Burner, Space Harrier, Mortal Kombat II, plus the first Console version of Doom, Star Wars Arcade, and several strange exclusives. It did exactly what the object visibly suggested it would do. More processors. More colors. More polygons. More wires behind the television.

Was it inelegant?

Yes.

Genesis Scumbags did not require elegance. They required power.

Virtual Boy demanded that an entire household purchase a second Nintendo system so one child could kneel alone before a red visor and develop neck pain playing monochrome tennis.

But that failure belonged to the Nintendo Loser, so it received immediate cultural bankruptcy protection.

The Nintendo Loser is permitted to fail. Failure actually improves his status. He bought the machine nobody understood. He appreciated the hidden Wario game. He saw the abandoned potential. He has spent thirty years explaining that Virtual Boy was not really supposed to be virtual reality, not really a handheld, not really a home console and not really finished.

Then what the fuck was it?

An idea?

A conversation?

A tax deduction?

The Genesis Scumbag receives no such mercy. He bought an actual functional upgrade and played actual games on it, but because Saturn appeared soon afterward he is treated as the victim of history’s greatest confidence scheme.

Retro YouTubers speak about the 32X buyer like he lost his pension in Enron.

“He had been betrayed.”

“He no longer trusted Sega.”

“It fractured the installed base.”

The installed base was not a sacred people. It was twelve-year-olds asking their fathers for electronics.

Nobody entered into a lifetime platform covenant with Sega. Nobody was promised ten years of 32X support in a notarized document. Sega released a device. Hundreds of thousands bought it. Sega released some games. Then superior hardware arrived and the device died.

This happened constantly in 1990s electronics.

Meanwhile Nintendo sold a machine that barely survived one Christmas and the same historians lower their voices and call it a brave experiment.

Clique Theory explains everything.

Nintendo’s clique eventually captured the historical institutions. The collectors. The game historians. The preservationists. The YouTubers who sit before shelves of boxed games and pronounce judgment on the purchasing decisions of children from 1994.

Their own failures become artifacts.

Sega’s failures become crimes.

Virtual Boy gets displayed in a glass cabinet.

32X gets held up like the murder weapon at trial.

Nintendo’s abandoned hardware always “contained ideas later perfected elsewhere.”

Sega’s abandoned hardware always “damaged the brand.”

Nintendo can release the Power Glove, Virtual Boy, 64DD, e-Reader, Game Boy Micro and Wii U, and each failure becomes a quirky detour on the inevitable road to triumph.

Sega releases Sega CD and 32X during a violent shift from cartridges and sprites into optical media and polygons, and suddenly every podcaster with a beard becomes an expert in channel management.

The double standard is obscene.

The 32X did not kill Sega.

It did not even sell unusually poorly compared with Virtual Boy. It sold about the same. Its true offense was failing while attached to a Genesis, the Scumbag console, where everyone could see it.

Virtual Boy failed privately. One Weird Nintendo Loser at a time, face buried in the visor, red light sealing him away from witnesses.

The 32X failed publicly. Loudly. Black plastic stacked on black plastic, cables everywhere, Genesis Scumbag insisting Virtua Fighter looked almost like the arcade while his SNES friend watched.

That humiliation became historical doctrine.

No more.

Virtual Boy was not a noble experiment. It was a Bomb.

The 32X was not the fall of Rome. It was an add-on with Star Wars Arcade.

Approximately equal sales.

Far better excuses.

The lies end now.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5885974&forum_id=2,#50022758)