The Switch peripheral is a well-built piece of nostalgia, but its games are just too stuck in the past.
Though the Virtual Boy was both a commercial and critical failure, the console’s infamy is part of what has made it such a fascinating piece of Nintendo’s history. Original units are still going for hundreds of dollars on bidding sites, and hobbyists have spent years keeping the Virtual Boy alive through emulation and homebrew games. For a long while, it seemed like Nintendo wanted nothing more than for the public to forget that the Virtual Boy ever existed. But over time, the company has become more comfortable acknowledging and even joking about the system through references in games like Super Smash Bros. Melee, Tomodachi Life, and Luigi’s Mansion 3.
Looking back on the Nintendo 3DS and more recent experiments like the Nintendo Switch and Labo, it wasn’t exactly surprising to learn that the Virtual Boy was being resurrected as a Switch peripheral designed to be used while playing classic Virtual Boy games on Nintendo Switch Online. There’s a nifty poetry to Nintendo’s worst-selling console being reimagined as a fancy peripheral for its most successful system of all time. Everything about the new Virtual Boy’s release speaks to Nintendo being confident enough to revisit one of its biggest failures and turn it into a flex that is quite literally designed to prop up the Switch family of consoles.
