Nintendo bringing Virtual Boy games to Nintendo Switch (with a dedicated accessory!) feels like a salute to gaming’s greatest inventor, Gunpei Yokoi
I've been fascinated by stories about Yokoi my entire life, so allow me to ramble about my nerdy interests for a minute so you can be excited too:
Gunpei Yokoi was the one to align Nintendo on the path of entertainment when engineering their first hit toy, Ultra Hand, in 1966. He would then go on to create the first handheld electronic games (Game & Watch, Game Boy...) It's safe to say his innovations shaped the identity not just of Nintendo, but gaming itself.
The thing is, being "ahead of your time" means people don’t always recognize your unapologetically imaginative genius in the moment. Yokoi lived that reality during his lifetime. That’s why times like this matter so much; where we can step back into the playground of his imagination once more, and experience the future as he foresaw it.
Virtual Boy wasn’t Yokoi’s most popular invention, but it might have been his boldest dream. Now, 30 years later, we can celebrate it for what it was: pure imagination, ahead of its time.