Several reasons:

1. Nintendo is releasing Virtual Boy - Nintendo Classics in February 2026: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVvaCe4esCQ

2. Nintendo are also releasing a Virtual Boy shell compatible with the Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2 which will allow you to view the games in 3D, although I'm guessing it won't look as sharp or bright as the original. https://www.nintendo.com/en-ca/store/products/virtual-boy-fo...

I had one at the time, got it for my birthday as a teen. It's terrible. It caused nausea, the "headset" was uncomfortable and if the stand broke or was lost you were screwed. The controller was clunky and hurt my knuckles. The screen wasn't an issue for me though. In fact I really loved the deep red, but then I used to spend hours in a darkroom printing pictures so the red felt like home. That said, some of the games were amazing especially because of the depth. Worth it? Not a chance. But it worked. It did what it said on the tin and the part that sucked wasn't the image, it was everything else related to interacting with that image.

I'd love to see someone take the lo-fi VR concept further with modern tech. It's proof that VR doesn't require color to be functional. There were ideas there we haven't fully explored.

The big question it opens up for me is:

- What happens if we ditch color and focus on clarity?

  - lower memory and compute requirements.

  - Dot pitch on screens can be smaller since no sub-pixels.

  - Optics can be tuned to a specific wavelength instead of having to fight with chromatic aberration due to the compressed optical pathway.

So much of VR today is focused on veracity, reproducing vivid worldly images. But what if we look elsewhere, the artificial and abstract. I want to see the kinds of sci-fi UIs and VR experiences brought to life pulled from the minimalism and simplicity of a time when cpu budgets per frame counted in understandable integers of cycles and color palettes you could count on your fingers.

I'm a huge fan of it - I was never able to get one while they were officially available, I only managed to rent one from Blockbuster a few times. I eventually picked one up on eBay in the early 2000's for $60, before they became collectors items.

The appeal is definitely somewhere between intrinsic and from the rarity - there's not just been no official way to play these games for the last 30 years, they've barely even gotten a passing mention, and even emualators have been few and far between. It was sad that Teleroboxer, Wario Land, and Mario Clash were basically lost to time.

The games definitely weren't up to to NES/SNES quality, but they were at least up to par with the average portable game at the time, which I think is what they were meant to be compared against. I see the Virtual Boy games as Game Boy games that suffered from the mechanics of the platform the platform they were released on. In that light, I think they compare pretty favorably to similar lesser-known games of the time; most WonderSwan games I've played, hell even a lot of Game Gear and Game Boy games, had much more serious gameplay issues, even though they were on hardware that was arguably less... challenging.

I was an active member of the VB community back in college. I did really fall in love with mine. I never experienced any nausea or headaches, and when properly adjusted I didn’t think it was terribly uncomfortable. The “screen” technology was actually very cool, two arrays of very small LEDs are swept across your field of vision by two rapidly fluttering mirrors, so in essence it’s an LED display. The picture is very bright and crisp. If you listen closely to a running Virtual Boy you can hear what sounds like fan noise, that’s the mirrors moving.

The first party games were (as usual for Nintendo fare) fun and quirky, but other than than Wario Land served more as tech demos. The one actually “3D” game for the console (Red Alarm) ran at a pitifully low frame rate. And also as today, there were no games for the platform that “didn’t work” in 2D, but they were for the most part enhanced by the stereo experience.

It was, as with most “virtual reality” experiments in the 90s, crippled by lack of processing power and cost constraints. It didn’t live up to its lead designer’s ambition and was rushed to market with little expectation of success.

I am excited for the games coming back, I really enjoyed Teleroboxer and Wario Land.

I loved it. Not SNES levels, but I had a lot of fun.

Caveat: I got it near the end of its life when blockbuster was selling off the ones they were renting. So for like 50 or 100 bucks we got the console and 4-5 games.

Was it perfect? No. But it was a Nintendo system and had some quite entertaining games. And some terrible ones of course.

It was a very interesting experiment. I’m sorry it was Gunpei Yokoi’s last project at Nintendo and he felt he had to resign from the failure.

I don’t know what “modern” people who weren’t around at the time think of it. And back then a lot of people really wanted it to be what it wasn’t. They really just wanted to judge it for not being the GameBoy Color.

It was a neat try at something totally different.

I hope having it available on the Switch virtual console means more people will play the games and find out just how good a few of them were.

I have nostalgia for Wario Land, because I played it for 5 minutes in a Toys'R'Us, and it's a good game which I never got to play in full until decades later. But I never owned one, so everything else you said rings true to me.

Wario Land VB is really, really good. It's a bit slight but seriously one of my favourite Nintendo platformers.

There's always been a very very small and intense VB fandom, but outside of them I don't think there's a ton of real nostalgia for it. The thing sold less than a million units; most people at the time either never played it or maybe tried it at a K-Mart demo kiosk for a few minutes.

To whatever extent that people are getting excited about the Virtual Boy now, I'd pin it on its very unique retro-future aesthetic. In the same way that people who weren't even alive for the 80s got really into synthwave, there's something about visions of the future from a time when the future was actually exciting that people find aesthetically compelling.

For me it is like an appendix - or a route we could have taken.

As a child of the 80s and 90s, all things VR held a special place in my heart, even if they were terrible.

I never had one, never even played the real hardware, but owning one would excite part of my psyche for sure!

Yeah, definitely this. It was just not a compelling platform.

When Virtual Boy first came out, Blockbuster Video allowed you to rent the system with some games. We played it a few times and got sick of it before the brief rental period even ended.

I really liked Red Alarm but it was a really tiring game to play. But overall I agree with you about the Virtual Boy. It's not a system that was received fondly for very good reasons.

IIRC aliaspider modified the Beetle VB core to do the same thing on the 3DS years before any standalone emulator... it worked but the framerate wasn't fullspeed and afaik they weren't interested in trying to optimize the core further.

I think there is also a Virtual Boy emulator for VR headsets.

I had the same thought, and I think it's the -kun suffix that makes the "puroje-" prefix more likely to be a verb than a noun, i.e. "12th incarnation of The One Who Projects" or "Mr. Projector #12".

I think that was the video!

Was a random YT recommendation, so I didn't know the source off the top of my head.

Wow, that was awesome. They had to crank up the FPS of the high-speed camera into the millions of FPS to see that brightness control over every individual LED was done by flashing it multiple times per scanline. Very cool.

A spinning mirror is certainly an option, there are many projects around using them as projectors e.g. [0]. It would need precision faces and be a larger volume than the flapping mirror approach. Because the mirrors are spring-mounted and designed to resonate at ~50Hz they actually take very little power to drive - there's an optosensor on the back used to stabilise the oscillation amplitude, which is why the VB and Private Eye display widths vary during startup.

Can't see the video from this location, so may be just restarting stuff in it.

[0] https://hackaday.com/2018/04/20/laser-projector-ditches-galv...

I'd guess a 6-sided mirror would be too big. The mirror needs a certain width for its reflection range to span across the viewport, and so a hexagon of that side length would be too big, particularly considering both eyes (the hexagons would have to overlap across the center line.)

Another problem would be that 60º between sides is too little angular separation. When the current frame approaches the right edge of your vision field, the next side of the mirror is already in position to be reflecting the LEDs into the left side of the vision field.

A 2-sided rotating mirror might work, but that's more complicated to manufacture and mount, such that I'd guess they found the back-and-forth simpler. Or else they found that rotating mirrors would impose a torque on the whole device and that wasn't workable. You could rotate the two mirrors in opposite directions, but that would mean the viewports are scanning in opposite directions (one right-to-left), and I don't know what that would do for the perceptions of 3d and persistence-of-vision.

The second revision with the better “head tracking” screen (I don’t remember how it worked) was much better than the launch model.

But mostly, you’d just turn 3D off. It was a gimmick, cut the resolution in half, and doubled processing requirements.

It just worked way better as a 2D screen. As you said, 2DS was good.

They should have just made the DS2, not gone for 3D. But such was the time.

> remember that initially the 3DS was such a flop at launch that Nintendo needed to pull a Hail Mary

I agree people weren't very excited about it, but the lack of interest affected the PS Vita (direct competitor without stereoscopic 3D) even worse.

I'm pretty sure the fact that 3DS/PSVita were much less successful than DS/PSP was caused by the rise of smartphones and app stores, which led to a flood of highly successful cheap mobile games that didn't require buying a separate handheld console.

I would add, I've always felt the addition of the 3D screen also held it back because the touch screen became relegated to always being secondary (so that the main display of the game could be 3D). Many games that were sequels to touch-focused DS games did this, they had you touching the bottom screen to interact with something on the top screen and made those games feel a lot worse to me.

> The 3D on it is a very neat trick, but it's mostly a distraction and there's something "uncanny valley"-like and unpleasant about it.

I recently picked up a used New 3DS XL to give this a try for the first time, and I actually really like it. With the eye tracking, it's pretty good imo. Did you also try the later iterations of the hardware?

IIRC they required all games to work without 3D (because some people couldn't see it? or it gave them motion sickness?), so it could never be a core mechanic and thus doomed to be a "neat trick".

But that's a thing people have to put on their faces, which, as we have seen, most people really don't like. It also costs extra money, unlike a "3D mode", which would just be enabled in the game menu.