A British tech pioneer has spoken out to reveal new details of a lost Nintendo console which was designed in the UK and scrapped in favour of the failed Virtual Boy system.

Jeremy ‘Jez’ San, 52, won global fame after a company he founded in his North London bedroom teamed up with Nintendo to design the legendary game Star Fox.

In the 1990s, San’s firm Argonaut was responsible for building the famous ‘SuperFX’ chip which was fitted inside game cartridges including Sta rFox and powered the first 3D graphics.

The Nintendo Virtual Boy was a disaster which was slammed by critics and rejected by consumers (Copyright: Nintendo)

After this, he went on to work on the design of a mysterious virtual reality (VR) gaming system called the ‘Super Visor’ which was cruelly cancelled in favour of an ill-fated machine called the Virtual Boy.

This console was a commercial flop and the development of VR gaming stalled for more than 20 years until the Facebook-owned American company Oculus VR released a headset called the Rift.

San was later awarded the first ever OBE for services to the gaming industry.

Nintendo’s decision also robbed Britain of its place in the history of virtual reality gaming.

‘I worked on a VR machine called the Super Visor for Nintendo, but unfortunately, we fell out,’ San told Metro.

‘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.’

Star Fox was the first game to use Argonaut’s SuperFX chip, which powered its advanced graphics (Copyright: Nintendo)

The Virtual Boy was released in 1995 and was the first system to offer 3D VR graphics.

But it was not a head-mounted helmet like most subsequent VR sets, meaning customers had to use it whilst sitting at a table.

It also offered disappointing red monochrome graphics and was very expensive.

Nintendo made just 22 games for the system before withdrawing it from sale in 1995.

Jez San told Metro his firm’s VR system was much more powerful, offering full-colour graphics and ‘head-tracking’, which meant it could respond to the movements of its wearer’s head.

This technology could have been used to let gamers look around virtual worlds and interact with simulated environments.

The Super Nintendo Entertainment System is regarded as one of the best consoles of all time and was a massive hit

‘It was a bad decision,’ San continued.

‘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.’

Here’s Jez San, who still thinks that VR could have happened a while ago (Picture: Bob Summerwill)

The technology was later offered to toy manufacturer Hasbro for a console called the Toaster, which also failed to see the light of day.

The early 1990s was something of a golden age for gaming, starting with the release of the SNES, the introduction of 3D gaming starting with Star Fox and then the arrival of powerful systems like the PlayStation, which proved to be a major threat to Nintendo.

It was also an era of moral panic about violence in computer games as well as their possible health risks.

Nintendo and its arch-rival Sega both placed warnings on their games which admitted they could cause epileptic fits in a very small number of gamers, although Nintendo successfully defended itself against legal action brought by a woman who claimed its games triggered her seizures.

San said this climate of fear contributed to the death of the Super Visor.

‘To use VR you have to wear some dorky thing,’ he added.

‘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.’

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‘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,’ he said.

‘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.’