Right after we celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Virtual Boy, Nintendo made a surprise announcement in their latest direct.

The Nintendo Switch & Nintendo Switch 2 are getting Virtual Boy games added to Nintendo Switch Online. The catch: You need an accessory to play them.

Surprisingly, this was the thing most people were discussing after the Direct. I think there are both bad things and good things with this announcement.

The Bad

• The accessories needed to play are either a $25 cardboard accessory¹ or a $99 full sized Virtual Boy replica that houses the Nintendo Switch. Games cannot be played without these.
• The games are tied to a subscription service
• The library will trickle with releases like the other systems on NSO
• These games will not be able to be captured or streamed with this setup
  

The Good

• Nintendo is finally acknowledging and making available Virtual Boy games for the first time since the release of the OG
• They are preserving the format for how the games were meant to be played
  

The Reasonable

• The $99 option is a collectable, and is way more affordable than getting an actual Virtual Boy and games
• This only appeals to a small audience. The vast majority of people will play these games once, and then never again.
• If you really want to play the games… there have been and will always be ways to play them in a better format than this².
  

Like many things, people overreact to the smallest things. I think the one thing Nintendo could do to improve this is just making these games playable in 2D like they were displayed during the Direct. It may not be the original intended gameplay experience in 3D, but if you’re already paying for Nintendo Switch Online, why not. The accessories just are additive to that experience.

As for the prices, we live in the timeline where Sony is charging $80 for a disc drive for a PS5. Please don’t act like Nintendo are the only one fleecing their customers. That’s almost every large company in 2025.

1. Very similar to the Nintendo Labo VR headset. ↩
2. See my other post about Red Viper. ↩