Switch 2's Virtual Boy is a faithfully awkward reproduction

Nintendo isn't trying to rewrite the history of its most notorious flop

Historically, Nintendo isn’t the kind of company that embraces failure. Its poorly received games rarely get ported to new platforms and its hardware flops tend to stay locked in the past, not turned into nostalgic mini consoles. That attitude is changing in a big way on Feb. 17. Nintendo is finally ready to acknowledge its most notorious mishap, the Virtual Boy, by selling a reproduction of the ill-fated virtual reality console and bringing its long-lost games to Nintendo Switch Online.

It’s a huge deal for a company that has a complicated relationship to preservation, and it’s also fascinating as an anti-redemption arc. Ahead of its release, Polygon went hands-on with the Virtual Boy reproduction and tried the first seven games coming to Switch Online. It was clear from that testing that Nintendo isn’t trying to rewrite the device’s legacy. It’s disorienting, the games stink, and I walked away from my session with a bit of back pain. But that’s exactly what I wanted.

First released in 1995, the Virtual Boy was Nintendo’s way-too-early swing at VR. It was essentially a headset attached to a pair of legs. Players would use it by standing it up on a surface and leaning into the visor to play stereoscopic 3D games presented entirely in red and black. It was famously nauseating, and Nintendo isn’t trying to pretend it wasn’t with its faithful recreation of the device. It still sucks… in a fun way.

The original Virtual Boy design has been impressively maintained here, with every visual detail captured in sturdy plastic. The buttons on the headset aren’t functional, but even those have been recreated to keep it looking authentic. The legs remain stable when the Switch 2 is slotted inside and the padding around the lenses is comfortable enough that I was able to play for 30 minutes straight. Don’t expect a working console complete with controller ports and a cartridge slot, but you still are getting something that preserves the physical experience of leaning into a tabletop headset to play games that are impossible to look at.

If anything, Nintendo is a bit too committed to the bit. There are no holes in the device that allow you to connect a charger or headphones to your Switch 2 when it is docked inside the shell. If you want to plug in while playing, you’ll need to leave the top of the device open. Of course, if you’re playing Virtual Boy games for so long that your Switch 2 battery begins to die, you’ve probably got some bigger problems coming your way, pal.

After some marveling, my body was ready. I hunched down, placed my head in the visor, and wrapped my arms around the leg with a wireless Nintendo Switch 2 Pro Controller in my hands. (Disappointingly, the Virtual Boy controller hasn’t been reproduced alongside the console.) With a small bit of wiggling to find the right angle, I could see the screen clearly, even with a bit of light leak from the edges. The most immediate thing I discovered is that I am 36 years old. All that leaning left me with a bit of upper back pain — extremely funny given that the likely audience for Virtual Boy nostalgia is middle-aged gaming historians.

From there, I bounced between the seven games coming to Switch Online at launch. Don’t expect to uncover a bunch of hidden gems in the bunch; most of them are simplistic novelties. Galactic Pinball is a straightforward pinball game, but red. Teleroboxer is a robotic riff on Punch-Out, but red. Golf is golf, but red. These are the kind of early experiments that you expect to see from a new console with a unique tech gimmick; it’s just that the Virtual Boy never really got enough games for it to ever exit that phase.

Some of the “better” games are the more surreal ones that match the retrofuturism of the Virtual Boy. 3D Tetris is difficult to parse, but it’s so trippy that I got sucked into it as a technosurrealist marvel from another era. The Star Fox-like space shooter Red Alarm has the right spirit too, even if it’s a little hard to navigate around its minimalist obstacles made up of red lines. There’s arguably only one game here that you could call “good”: Wario Land. The 2D platformer makes excellent use of the Virtual Boy’s 3D effect, as I jumped between spiked balls on chains that swung back and forth from my eyes.

Aside from that, I don’t expect many moments of transcendence when revisiting the Virtual Boy library — especially since there weren’t many games made for the console at all. The device failed in the mid-90s for good reason and the recreation doesn’t sugarcoat it by turning the experience into something it wasn’t. It’s still kind of a pain to use, the visuals are a little hard to look at, and I can’t imagine sitting down with it for a long session without a trip to the chiropractor after. It’s still bad, and I want more of that from Nintendo.

Don’t just rerelease the 3D Mario games everyone loves over and over; bring back Mario’s Time Machine and I Am a Teacher: Super Mario Sweater! Gaming history is too often framed through the good, telling the story of the artform through artistic milestones. But the bad and the ugly are just as important to understanding how we got here. I genuinely loved playing around with a bunch of certified clunkers during my demo, and I can’t wait to tinker with it more at launch.

If you’re going to drop $100 on a fake Virtual Boy, just don’t do it expecting to play dozens of foundational games that you’ll keep coming back to. You’re paying for a slice of bizarro history that’s been buried for 30 years. That’s valuable for a completely different reason than retro gaming machines packed with influential classics. You can learn just as much from bad games.