Although the Virtual Boy was a commercial and critical failure, the console’s infamous reputation is part of what made it such a fascinating piece of Nintendo history. The original units still go for hundreds of dollars on auction sites, and hobbyists have spent years keeping the virtual boy alive with emulations and home games. For a long time, Nintendo seemed to want nothing more than for the public to forget that the Virtual Boy ever existed. However, over time, society has become more comfortable acknowledging the system and even joking about it through in-game references such as Super Smash Bros, Life of Tomodachiand Luigi’s Mansion 3.
Looking back at the Nintendo 3DS and more recent experiments like the Nintendo Switch and Labo, it wasn’t exactly surprising to learn that the Virtual Boy had been resurrected as a Switch peripheral designed to be used to play classic Virtual Boy games on Nintendo Switch Online. Reimagined as a luxury peripheral for its most successful system of all time, Nintendo’s best-selling console has a clever poetry to it. Everything about the release of the new Virtual Boy suggests that Nintendo is confident enough to revisit one of its biggest failures and turn it into a flex that is literally designed to support the Switch family of consoles.
However, when I recently spent some time playing with the new Virtual Boy, Nintendo’s confidence in this $100 side quest didn’t feel entirely justified. The headset and stand combo is a gorgeous piece of retro technology that’s comfortable enough to stick your face into. And while I was kind of hoping for some disorienting visual weirdness, the console’s stereoscopic lenses didn’t leave me with a headache. But the way Virtual Boy games played is a little clunky, making the device seem more like a years-old novelty than a system I could see myself spending some time with.
The main selling point of this thing is that it faithfully recreates the aspects of the original console that worked while smoothing out some of the roughness that led to its flop in the 90s. But if retro nostalgia isn’t exactly your jam, you might want to pass on the plastic model and consider dusting off your old Labo kit.
As someone who never played the original Virtual Boy and tends to find VR headsets uncomfortable to wear, I was pleasantly surprised at how well my face fit into the new peripheral, which is meant to sit on a table and be used with a controller after you insert your Nintendo Switch or Switch 2 into it. Unlike my cardboard Labo headset—which was prone to outside light seeping in—the plastic Virtual Boy was able to immerse me completely dark as I sat in a well-lit event space.
This darkness caused red — which can be customized to other colors — to pop out on the monochrome Virtual Boy game selection screen when scrolling through the limited library of 3D titles. Nintendo says it plans to release 14 different Virtual Boy games by the end of this year through its Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack subscription package, which costs $50 a year for individual accounts and $80 for family plans. The first batch of Virtual Boy games is due out on February 17, when the $100 peripheral and its cheaper $25 cardboard counterpart are released.
During my time with the Virtual Boy, I found myself enthralled, but a little underwhelmed, when playing games Galactic pinball, Teleroboxerand a new port Mansion of Innsmouth — a title previously only released in Japan. Games ran perfectly fine and looked like what you’d expect from a point in Nintendo’s history when it was experimenting with a new way to consume its games. As impressive as this lens technology might have been when the original Virtual Boy was released, it pales in comparison to what Nintendo did with the 3DS, and it never managed to fully trick my eyes into thinking I was playing a game in 3D.
Ironically, these were aesthetically simpler games with vector graphics 3D Tetris and Red alert it felt like they really drew me in with their novel approach to presenting three-dimensional space. It also has to be said that playing these games in any form has become much more difficult over the years. This new peripheral might not exactly start a new wave of Virtual Boy game preservation, but it will make them infinitely more accessible — especially to people who weren’t around during the original console’s short lifespan.
Although Nintendo didn’t give me hands-on time with the cardboard Virtual Boy, I was much more interested in trying it out and seeing how these games might look on Labo. The plastic model certainly looks cool and will probably scratch a certain itch for those who wish they could have owned a Virtual Boy in the 90s. But in 2026, these kinds of 3D games will feel a little too dated to guarantee the price of admission if you do not already have an NSO subscription.