Let's take a comprehensive journey through the history of Virtual Boy
Were things really as bad as the system's reputation would suggest? Let's find out.
The Virtual Boy was a disaster. That's the common refrain about the system, anyway. It supposedly caused legendary designer Gunpai Yokoi to retire from Nintendo, the company he had helped define; it flopped hard at retail; it only had 22 games in its global library and never even shipped in Europe; and Nintendo completely ignored its existence between 1996 and 2011, at which point it became convenient to cite Virtual Boy as precedent for the 3DS's 3D graphics. Virtual Boy, in short, is the worst, and everything it touched turned to garbage.
But is that really true? Was there really nothing worth playing on the system besides Wario Land? Well, we're about to find out. Welcome to Virtual Boy Works.
This new video is the first episode of, most likely, 24: One for each of the 22 games in the console's worldwide library, one on the system, and one on interesting homebrew projects. Homebrew projects like the VirtualTap, whose existence has made this entire video venture possible!
My hunch going into Virtual Boy Works is that we're going to find that the system's library was nowhere near as bad as memes and assumptions suggest. Certainly this first entry, Mario's Tennis, is pretty decent despite its obvious flaws. Well, good or bad, we'll know soon enough. Please tag along for the next six months or so as I tear open the Virtual Boy's library—well, not literally tear. These games are all on loan from Retronauts regular and sell for a pretty penny these days. I wouldn't do that to him.
