Nintendo’s Virtual Boy Isn’t Underrated—But Who Knows What It Could’ve Turned Into?

By Marc Normandin | August 20, 2025 | 12:00pm

Video Games Features virtual boy

Nintendo’s Virtual Boy Isn’t Underrated—But Who Knows What It Could’ve Turned Into?

The Virtual Boy is not underrated. In fact, 30 years after its launch, Nintendo’s tabletop oddity is on the short list of items from video game history that’s properly rated.

It offered very few games, with just 22 released in its short life: that’s just over half of what Sega’s derided 32X add-on managed, and about one-fourth of the Atari Jaguar’s library. The red-and-black color scheme did not go over nearly as well with the public or headache prevention efforts as the Game Boy’s green-tinted monochrome. And the system was designed to be portable, but in practice that wasn’t true given its constraints and requirements for use.

The Virtual Boy is such a nothing blip in Nintendo’s history that it’s pretty easy to forget that it was even part of the 32-bit wave of platforms, and that they had not just sat out that moment in time with their existing Super Nintendo and Game Boy platforms while working on the Nintendo 64. They had actually taken a huge swing with technology they had flirted with a bit in the past—the Famicom had a pair of active shutter glasses for stereoscopic 3D in select games—and watched it fail to the degree that you can see people out there saying that the Wii U was Nintendo’s biggest failure without being corrected for it, because many don’t even remember that the Virtual Boy existed. Nintendo’s first go at HD, the Wii U sold over 13 million units, by the way; their first dedicated 3D platform moved fewer than 800,000.

The primary issue is that the technology was not quite ready for what Nintendo wanted to do with it yet. The red-and-black color scheme was due to the moment in time: that was what was available for the LED screens of the day, in the same way that the Game Boy’s graphing calculator-style screen was the mature—read: inexpensive—technology available when it was created. This was a choice made before Nintendo even got involved, when the tech that would power the Virtual Boy was the work of Allen Becker’s Reflection Technology, Inc., which had prototyped it and attempted to sell it again and again until they finally landed on the idea of toys, and then, Nintendo.

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Gunpei Yokoi, father of the Game & Watch and Game Boy and the head of Nintendo R&D1, wanted to make a pair of wearable goggles that were truly portable using Reflection’s tech, which utilized reflections—get it?—of the LEDs’ display to produce a hi-res image right there on your eyeball. Because of when the Virtual Boy was designed, however, Nintendo’s engineers were concerned that having high-frequency radio emissions that close to a user’s brain might be unsafe—if the project had come along later in time, when the effects of EMF radiation were better researched, then the Virtual Boy might have still been a lightweight wearable.

Then again, Nintendo’s lawyers were afraid of liability in every conceivable way when it came to the Virtual Boy. As explained at Fast Company for the system’s 20th anniversary in 2015:

“Not long after, Yokoi’s console evolved from a strap-on headset into a heavier device that one could prop up onto one’s face using a clumsy shoulder stand. Again, Nintendo’s legal department feared liability issues; the device might cause children to fall down a stairwell while playing. Reflection engineer Ben Wells also recalls a nightmare scenario where they envisioned a kid playing VR32 [the codename for the Virtual Boy] in the back of a car that gets into an accident. Glass and plastic shoved into children’s faces was something Nintendo wanted to avoid.

Hobbled by liability concerns, VR32 soon evolved into a bulky red viewport mounted to a bi-pod that rested on a table. No more attachments or headbands: People would have to hunch over the device to play. But hey—it was still in 3D.”

As the comfort and promise of the Virtual Boy dwindled with every note from a lawyer—the system’s manual is full of warnings that imply it could be bad for your health to use the Virtual Boy, even if the research the company invested in said that it was perfectly safe to use with the safeguards Nintendo had already put into place—so too did the feelings of Nintendo itself, including Yokoi. He was told not to rely on having access to Mario and that franchise’s characters on the Virtual Boy, with the rest of Nintendo gearing up for the Nintendo 64 and the launch of Super Mario 64, and the system was being considered as a way to fill space in the market before the arrival of that system instead of as a major product to stand alongside it. It’s not that the Virtual Boy would have survived forever and ever in the shape it launched in, but the fact that Nintendo realized it might not be worth the trouble while they were still making it sealed its fate well in advance of the launch.

Nintendo Virtual Boy

The Virtual Boy is not underrated, no, but its potential certainly was and is. That potential was underrated in the moment, as evidenced by the lack of support from third parties and from Nintendo itself the further along the project got. There’s promise shown in the games that do exist, in terms of utilization of the technology, but essentially all that showed up on the platform were launch-window games: the system didn’t even make it out of the calendar year of its release in Japan, and in North America, it got exactly one year.

A not-insignificant part of game development comes from familiarity with the technology used to make it. Look at the NES games released in 1983 compared to those that arrived in 1993. Nintendo released an arcade port of Donkey Kong on the Famicom for its launch in ‘83, one which was an improvement on the original arcade edition on the audio side, and was able to add some additional bells and whistles, too, but was weaker graphically. Just over two years later, Super Mario Bros. came out on the same system, with full scrolling, larger and more colorful sprites, full-color backgrounds, significantly more variety in what you were looking at and interacting with—there was just far, far more to do, as well as more robust and faster movement. Three years after that was Super Mario Bros. 3: that’s on the same system as the Donkey Kong port, with the only difference between the two on the hardware side being time and familiarity. They don’t even look like they came from the same planet! And both pale in comparison, visually, to Kirby’s Adventure, a late-life NES release from HAL Laboratory that pushed the limits of what the system could display, in the same way that Kirby’s Dream Land 3 would do so on the SNES four years later.

Square’s Final Fantasy IV, released in 1991, looked like a more colorful NES game regularly, with sprites sized to match. Consider the progression of that company’s sprites in their role-playing games from that point forward: Final Fantasy VI uses the same larger sprites from IV’s battles on the map, too, and by the time you get to the likes of Bahamut Lagoon you’re looking at these incredibly intricate, massive, and beautiful pieces of art. You can play the same game with Quintet going from ActRaiser to, years later, Terranigma, or with the eventual incorporation of pre-rendered graphics inserted into games like Donkey Kong Country or Treasure Hunter G, or the advances made in SNES tech that allowed for the likes of Star Fox or Stunt Race FX or even a port of DOOM to exist on the platform.

Nintendo had not fully envisioned what the Virtual Boy could do yet, and neither had their development partners, but no one was given the chance to, either. What could the Virtual Boy have been, if it were allowed to be more of a boutique product with teams tinkering with it over a longer lifespan, instead of as a pillar that Nintendo did not hesitate to dispose of as soon as they were sure that they could get by with one fewer holding them up, out of a combination of embarrassment and dismay with what it was not? What was its Kirby’s Adventure or Donkey Kong Country or Final Fantasy VI? Admittedly, maybe there was never going to be one, but we’ll never know either way, since the system was never given the chance to survive long enough to even make an attempt.

Sure, T&E Soft’s Red Alarm is “just” wireframe graphics, but it’s wireframe graphics on a 3D system, in 1995! It’s 32-bit tech right there up in your eyeballs, released not all that long after Star Fox on the SNES! Hudson Soft’s Vertical Force takes the typical setup of a 2D shoot ‘em up and adds layers to the proceedings: imagine if Star Soldier required you to switch between the closer foreground and a further background layer in order to defeat enemies parallel, below, or above you, and you get the idea—Taito did something not entirely dissimilar with RayForce the year before, except you used homing lasers to defeat enemies in the layer below you. With Vertical Force, you had to switch back and forth yourself.

Mario Tennis had you playing tennis from a ground level perspective, which is weird, but once you get a feel for it, there’s definitely something there. It’s thin, as it basically amounts to a prototype for an idea, but it could have been built into something more significant with time. Virtual Boy Wario Land pulled heavily from the gameplay of Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3, but it did it with incredibly detailed, hi-res sprites and expressive animation, and backgrounds that absolutely popped because of the stereoscopic 3D tech. Enemies would move out of the background and into the foreground, as did Wario himself: this game predated Namco’s Klonoa: Door to Phantomile on the Playstation—which similarly played in the 2.5D platformer space utilizing both foreground and background movement as well as projectiles that traveled through both—by over two years.

There were seeds being planted here, the start of something that could have grown into something larger, but they weren’t cared for and seeds are all they got to be. The games might not have wholly impressed in that moment, but the next wave that built on them never got the chance that Super Mario Bros. did a couple of years after Nintendo first brought a bunch of existing arcade titles into the living room to show off what the Famicom was capable of.

What’s incredible, too, is that Nintendo still saw 3D as part of the future despite the failure of the Virtual Boy and their almost immediate discontinuing of it—they just knew this wasn’t going to be the product to inspire like they had hoped it would be, back when they agreed to a license with Reflection and invested in the company. In an Iwata Asks centered around the development of the Nintendo 3DS, Satoru Iwata revealed that the GameCube had 3D-ready tech in it that had inevitably gone unused, and they attempted to make the Game Boy Advance SP a 3D system a decade before the 3DS, as well, before deciding that the resolution of LCDs was too low at the time to move forward with the project just yet. This was far from just bandying about ideas, too, as Iwata explained:

“The liquid crystal for [the 3D screens] was still expensive. Simply put, Nintendo GameCube could display 3D images if you attached a special LCD, but that special liquid crystal was really expensive back then… We couldn’t have done it without selling it for a price far above that of the Nintendo GameCube system, itself! We already had a game for it, though—Luigi’s Mansion simultaneously released with Nintendo GameCube… We had a functional version of that in 3D… Even without special glasses, the 3D looked pretty good. But we considered how much the liquid crystal would cost, and it was just too expensive. We figured the market just wasn’t there for it.”

What should blow you away is that Nintendo finally did get stereoscopic 3D, without cumbersome glasses or metal plates weighing things down or the need to hunker and hurt your neck and back in order to see Wario moving around between foreground and background, on the 3DS… and they didn’t put the Virtual Boy library on there. It wasn’t a matter of the system not being able to properly emulate the games, either, because the modding community has shown that it’s not only possible, but that the games thrive on even the initial version of the 3DS without all the extra horsepower of the New 3DS line.

You would already know that Virtual Boy Wario Land was a great time, or that Mario Tennis introduced us to another way of thinking about the sport’s representation in video games, or about the 3D pinball game full of Metroid Easter Eggs if Nintendo had made Virtual Boy part of their 3DS Virtual Console. About the extremely expressive Bomberman sprite in Hudson Soft’s Virtual Boy edition of Panic Bomber, about their own attempts at playing with layers in a shoot ‘em up, and more. (Not much more in a 22-game library, sure, but still more than these few.)

The good news is that you still can know about these things now, and experience them for yourself. Nintendo seems content to basically forget that the Virtual Boy itself ever existed, outside of the discussions that some executives like Iwata had on the subject when it came time to tell people that the 3DS wasn’t going to be like that boondoggle, no no, you can trust your old pal Nintendo this time. (The 3DS and its stereoscopic 3D do rule, by the way, that wasn’t sarcasm.) So, if they have decided these games do not exist and neither does a way to play them, then your only option is to find them yourself.

The 3DS’ native stereoscopic 3D powers an emulator, Red Viper, that reproduces the effects of the Virtual Boy without all of the negatives you might have fairly or unfairly associated with the system itself. It even lets you change the color scheme away from the red-and-black setup to something your eyes might find more pleasing or illuminating, in the same way that the Super Game Boy and Nintendo’s Game Boy service on Nintendo Switch Online does. You have to mod your 3DS system to use this emulator—or be someone who both reads about the Virtual Boy’s anniversary and has an Apple Vision Pro—but if you’re brave enough to take that plunge, then Virtual Boy games await: you can find out for yourself just what kind of promise these 22 titles suggested before the system’s discontinuation.

What’s the alternative, if the system’s games use highly-specific tech that isn’t reproduced on modern platforms, and therefore will never be ported to them? If the company responsible for many of them existing at all, or at least some of the licensing for these games, refuses to acknowledge that they even exist? You can just read about them, sure, or you can go on a little adventure.

Despite the onslaught of re-releases in the present, there are far more games—and far more systems—out there that will otherwise be forgotten about entirely, especially if they lack any kind of commercial appeal that their current license holders can leverage. If Nintendo already didn’t cycle the Virtual Boy back in when it had the perfect chance to, well, there’s your cue that it’s on the schedule to be forgotten about forever by them, as if it never happened. Celebrate its birthday by doing with that information what you will.

Marc Normandin covers retro video games at Retro XP, which you can read for free but support through his Patreon, and can be found on Bluesky at @marcnormandin