Nintendo actually showed me the Virtual Boy

I had the best and worst of times. PLUS: Switch breaks a sales record, a key Nintendo stat declines, three labor complaints are withdrawn, Ubisoft fires a developer, and Disney's new boss likes games

This morning, on the occasion of the original Nintendo Switch reaching “the highest sales volume of any Nintendo hardware,” history’s most successful gaming company published a chart.

The chart stacks 12 pieces of video game hardware released by Nintendo, from Switch 2 down to the Nintendo Entertainment System, with bars protruding to the right to show how many units each shipped.

The longest bar, for the Switch, represents a historic 155.37 million devices. That bar is a tiny bit longer than the company’s previous hardware sales champ, the Nintendo DS, which is parked at 154.02 million units in Nintendo’s official tally).

Nintendo’s chart is nearly comprehensive, save one. The Wii is on there, with its decently long sales bar. So is the Game Boy. The GameCube shows a fairly short bar. Even the Wii U is on the chart, showing its meager sales.

Chart of Nintendo hardware sales. Source: Nintendo financial report.

There’s just no Virtual Boy on there. Over the years, Nintendo has avoided talking about its 1995 flop.

That makes it all the more bizarre that Nintendo invited me to play a new version of the Virtual Boy in New York City last week.

Nintendo also had a new Mario Tennis game there, the expanded Switch 2 version of Super Mario Bros., and some other stuff.

The Virtual Boy wasn’t the only hook, though I’d have braved New Jersey Transit just to play it. I’d never used a Virtual Boy.

Right there in Nintendo’s rented ground-floor showroom, around the corner from where I entered, were desks set up with replica Virtual Boys: $100 shells (on sale February 17) into which you can slide a Switch or Switch 2 to experience the monochromatic pseudo-virtual-reality device that Nintendo often prefers to pretend didn’t exist.

It was both the worst and the best thing I played at Nintendo’s event.