The Nintendo Virtual Boy turned 30 years old this month. Originally released August 14th 1995, the Virtual Boy remains as Nintendo’s least successful product.

I never had a Virtual Boy growing up. I remember seeing it in a Best Buy and thinking: NEAT. It started at a retail price of $179 ($370 adjusted for inflation). A bit pricey and there weren’t many games available.

Only 22 games were ever released for it, and only 14 in North America. Commercially it was a flop. It was developed by Gunpei Yokoi, the same designer of the original Game Boy. The Virtual Boy was never really meant to be a mass-produced product, mostly functioning as a tech demo, but Nintendo was set on sending it to retail.

“Even Mr. Yokoi admitted that he himself felt uneasy during development. He described it as a kind of ‘hiri-hiri’ feeling. This is an onomatopoeia that only exists in Japanese, but think about it as the sort of feeling you would get when being cooked slowly over a frying pan.”

Source: https://www.polygon.com/nintendo-virtual-boy-30th-anniversary/

The Virtual Boy employed stereoscopic via a rotating mirror, well before stereoscopic 3D became more mainstream.

Nintendo was poised to reattempt 3D one more time before it became a success. The GameCube was prototyped with an LCD screen that was handsfree.

“Yeah. We tried fitting the Nintendo GameCube with a small, roughly four-inch, LCD that allowed you to enjoy Luigi’s Mansion in glasses-free 3D.”

Source: Hideki Konno via an Iwata Asks Interview

It wasn’t until 2011 when Nintendo launched the 3DS that their vision of 3D was fully released and became a success (albeit through a rocky launch period).

Nintendo even employed VR via Nintendo Labo on the Nintendo Switch and made VR modes for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

The Virtual Boy in 2025

The Virtual Boy remains a very niche, memorable, meme product of Nintendo. But it does have its supporters. New homebrew games are being developed for it. There have been mods to output the display via HDMI for streamers.

By far, the best support it’s received has been an emulator you can load on a hacked 3DS¹. The emulator is called Red Viper, and allows the ability to load Virtual Boy games on a 3DS and play them in handsfree stereoscopic 3D in a way that almost fulfills the vision once set out in 1995. Most recently, the emulator added multicolor support so you can change the original monochromatic red² to something that helps distinguish foreground objects from the background.

There are some actual unique good games for the Virtual Boy such as: Virtual Boy Wario Land³ and Jack Bros. Along with 2 different versions of Tetris which comprises nearly 10% of the Virtual Boy catalog⁴.

So I salute you Virtual Boy, a unique flop much like the Wii U that paved the way for the future of 3D and trying something different. Happy Birthday!

1. You should both have a 3DS, and hack it. ↩
2. Something I call “eye bleeding red”. ↩
3. A novel unique elements from this game at the time involved jumping from the foreground to the background, and games much later like Kirby Triple Deluxe, and Super Mario Bros. Wonder have employed since. ↩
4. Which of course I own BOTH versions. ↩

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