Gail Tilden is a Nintendo legend. She joined the company in 1983, helped launch the NES in North America, and went on to become the editor-in-chief of Nintendo Power, the official in-house magazine. Later in her Nintendo career, she became VP of brand management and helped bring Pokémon to the West.

She's just given a new interview with Retro Gamer magazine, where she talks a little about the harder moments of her time at Nintendo Power, specifically when promoting things she would rather have ignored.

During the chat, she is quizzed about the times covering Nintendo products might have provoked stress, and replies that "there was nothing worse than thinking about the Virtual Boy. But thankfully it was short-lived."

When it is pointed out that many people still have affection for the ill-fated console, Tilden replies that it was "tough for us, with it giving people headaches, and the whole 3D-ness of it. I think that's cool now, especially knowing what you can do now with [virtual reality] headsets, but, you know, seriously. Some weird, red display; it reminded me of being at the eye doctor and getting an eye test."

She adds that covering one of the greatest video games of all time also caused some friction:

"It was a situation like Tetris, which we had to write a lot about. For Tetris, we had to do a cover, a 16-page insert; it was one of those things where Mr Arakawa himself says, "You've got to give Tetris coverage in Nintendo Power." And how do you give good coverage to something like [Tetris]?

Similarly, how do you give good coverage to the Virtual Boy, a 3D system, all-red display, laser lines on the screen. That was why the Virtual Boy was so difficult for me. It wasn't fun to put those issues together.

Initially, of course, you're excited to see something new. It's in 3D. That's exciting. But the truth of it is, it's like a ROB the Robot. The reality is that it's not fun, and then being Nintendo Power, [when something isn't fun] that's especially not fun.

There's just no way that Virtual Boy games are going to outshine other games, and even though it's a Nintendo-published magazine, you want to have [editorial] principles, so you resist making something like the Virtual Boy a star."

The Virtual Boy remains Nintendo's most dramatic hardware failure, but it has recently undergone a kind of revival: an attachment was released for Switch 2 that lets you play Virtual Boy games through emulation.