Pushing the Virtual Boy to its Absolute Limit

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The Virtual Boy has a fascinating but tortured history as the project which led to Gunpei Yokoi being fired from Nintendo. Anybody into games knows about that, but for a comprehensive history of this platform, look here.

That's not what this article's about. This article's about the Virtual Boy's unrealized potential. We'll be looking at the most technically impressive games to come out during its lifespan, as well as the most impressive homebrew to come out since then.

The Virtual Boy was a 32 bit console, so you'd expect it to be decent at polygons. Only, it was tasked with rendering everything twice; once for each eye. This cut down on the complexity of what it could display at a tolerable framerate.

That's the single biggest reason it sits on a stand rather than being head mounted, so you can't turn your head with it on. That would've made people sick indeed, where forcing them to look in a single direction mitigated the effect.

Most of the games didn't even attempt real 3D. They were either the sort of 2D side scrolling titles seen on SNES but with a depth perception related gimmick (Wario Land VB) or utilized Mode 7 (Mario Tennis).

Red Alarm was one of the only titles to actually manage truly 3D visuals, albeit bare vectors. Not even filled polygons, which made some parts of the game visually confusing:

3D Tetris was another truly 3D title, this time with a mixture of vectors and filled polygons. Many Virtual Boy game videos display both eyes so if you have Google Cardboard or something similar, you can watch on your phone with it to get some impression of what it was like inside the headset:

Insmouse no Yukata was a Japanese dungeon crawler based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Odd combo? Yet it exists. This was not truly 3D, not even in the 2.5D way that Wolfenstein was. Instead it's the fake grid based pseudo-3D of oldschool first person RPGs like Wizardry or A Bard's Tale:

There's not much to impress the eyeballs in the way of released games. But homebrew programmers have risen to the challenge, producing such 3D marvels as Zpace Racers (Skip to 3 minutes in):

Hunter was an Amiga and Atari ST game that was way ahead of its time. Featuring fully polygonal graphics, big open worlds to traverse and vehicles in which to do so, it was the predecessor of such modern series as Far Cry and Just Cause. To see it ported to Virtual Boy really is a marvel:

The venerable Yeti 3D engine has also been ported to Virtual Boy (along with every other platform ever to exist). The differently colored hand and gun are because it's running in an emulator. Of course on actual hardware, only black and various shades of red are possible:

Here's a less sophisticated but smoother raycasting engine demo. Very similar to Wolfenstein 3D, it shows that if the Virtual Boy had only lasted a bit longer we might've gotten a link cable multiplayer 3D shooter for it. That would've gone a long way to redeem the system:

I'll go ahead and include Bound High! in this list because it makes perhaps the best used of the Virtual Boy's sprite and background scaling capabilities to simulate 3D gameplay. Also a good way to induce vomiting if you discover you've been poisoned:

I've left out certain other promising homebrew projects, like Faceball Remastered, because better implementations of 3D (or 2.5D) engines already exist on the Virtual Boy. There's a surprisingly lively homebrew community for this black sheep of the Nintendo family, which has been reinvigorated by the arrival of actual mainstream VR.

If you're curious what home VR looked like in the 1990s for some reason, or just need to burn out your retinas after being tricked into viewing Lemon Party, the Virtual Boy may just be the console for you!

^{Stay cozy!}