Intertwixt 20: What’s Old Is New Again

I just got back from a whirlwind, hypnotic and inspiring trip to Germany for a conference called AUREA, staying at a theme park where I gave a talk about my last year visiting and living with immersive and wearable tech. The talk, called The Future of the Connected Self, was really about me and my relationship to the magical doorways to experiences in this world. Amazing theater pieces and theme park rides, or headsets I dip into…or, glasses and wristbands and rings I try to wear around with me all day. Where are the magic moments? The frictions? This is the spirit of why I created The Intertwixt in the first place. It’s my series of love letters and late-night musings on these thoughts.

But one device I touched on in my talk is a Nintendo Switch accessory coming out in a week or so that’s a recreation of a 1995 game console I never owned. The Virtual Boy was Nintendo’s long-ago attempt to make an immersive, almost-VR game system. It’s coming back, and as my kid asked me when I told him…”Nintendo made a Virtual Boy?”

These thoughts about old and new also hit me when I dug a big box of old papers out of my mom’s basement a few months ago, part of a very slow ongoing promise to triage my fossilized stored memories from her home. In my own home, I finally opened the box up and found an old high school newspaper from 1992 inside. I forgot I was on the staff of the Smithtown West Knight Times. But I also forgot I wrote a full-page story in the April 1992 issue that was all about the future of VR. And discovering this, 34 years later, made me sit down in a wave of dizziness. Time is indeed a flat circle.

”VR: A Brave New Reality,” I declared to my Smithtown West high school classmates. I knew something big was coming. And soon. “Of course, this is not new,” I said. “By listening to a Walkman, the sense of sound is provided by an artificial source.” I mention the VR arcade game at my mall that was already there (Virtuality, I remember the checkerboard and pterodactyl). I mention the Lawnmower Man movie. And I predict Sega or Nintendo will have a VR game system by the end of the decade.

I read Mondo 2000 back then, which was full of VR ideas. I read William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy. VR was in the air, having one of its many bubble moments. And now, in 2026, we’re still seeking the future that’s not fully here.

I’ve come to realize something in my own life, which I mentioned in my talk in Germany: ideas never die. Old plays and stories I wrote decades ago and I moved on still have seeds that are germinating in me. I’ve learned to welcome them again. I’ve been writing sequels to old plays of mine these last few years, or sort-of sequels. Reinventions. Scott Stein’s Last Play, a twin to Scott Stein’s First Play (written 1999). Endemica, a twin to Eugenica (written 1995). I’m working on Accelerant, a twin to Utopia Parkway (written in 1996). I assume you’ve never heard of the old plays. The new plays live as new things, built on the forgotten old.

Nintendo bringing back Virtual Boy isn’t just nostalgia. It’s a reinvention. For as many people that are out there who remember the old red and black tripod 3D system, there are far more who never knew it existed. I dipped my head in for a while, and while it’s simple, and very much a 3D Game Boy type of experience, it’s charming. Weird. It reminds me of recent retro absurdities like UFO 50, or the tiny yellow Panic Playdate. Virtual Boy now feels like it’s new again.

At AUREA 8, an idea-sharing awards event in Rust, Germany, I joined hundreds of others in fields spanning neuroscience, spatial audio, AI, agentic personalities, theme park ride design, XR theater, gaming, digital twin platforms, animation, and many more. We talked, we ate, we listened, we demoed, we walked Europa Park, we partied, we dreamed. I did my little talk, and performed a few magic tricks for fun. I found my life at CNET, and my life as a re-emerging theater trickster, blending.

I gave my talk wearing smart glasses (Even Realities G2), which have displays and a ring peripheral. I used a teleprompter to deliver talking points for fun, although I really just improvised. These brilliant cross-disciplinary people at the conference didn’t all know what these glasses could do, which reminded me how new so many of these technologies are to everyone. Even G2 glasses do a very different subset of things than Meta’s Ray-Ban Gen 2 glasses. There are so many more glasses and AI wearables coming. How do all these things work (and not work) with the dreams of artists and creators everywhere? What happens to VR, a technology that feels suddenly semi-abandoned by Meta after they flushed game studio acquisitions and a fitness platform away? Where does generative AI work into all of this? No one truly knows. We are all guessing and experimenting and floating along together in the dark ride.

I spent an evening in a stunning, slow-moving, hypnotic, three-hour immersive dinner ride my first night at Europa Park, an experience called Eatrenalin. It was both like nothing I’d ever done before, and a remixing of many things I’d done before. A multi-course dinner, a series of immersive rooms, trackless seats that became drifting vehicles that carried me to tables and inside a starship that took me to another galaxy. It was both full of memories of things I love and a journey somewhere new. New experiences are always built this way, aren’t they? What’s old is new again.

For all the changes, the seeds of good ideas can last from one pivot to the next. I’m digging into my obsessions and thinking about the relationship of history to the present. 

Most tech execs find their inspirations from older books and films and games. Ready Player One. Snow Crash. Neuromancer. Iron Man. Star Wars. The Kingsman. Dune. The Culture books. Her. Myst. The pieces of this half-built accelerating future are being hooked onto ancient dreams that themselves were inspired by older works. As Twin Peaks said, “That gum you like is going to come back in style.” Twin Peaks, and then, 25 years later, Twin Peaks The Return. Revisited. Reinvented. 

Things move so fast. But I’m also keeping my old ideas re-circulating. To get to the new, we build from what we remember. That’s helping me right now as I feel unmoored in a world that’s moving beyond my control. We’re not as lost, maybe, as we think we are.