Nintendo revives the Virtual Boy, its most infamous flop, at a luxury price on the Switch

Today's jam-packed showcase from Nintendo demonstrated a bevy of games--and showed no fear from the company that consumers will slow down their Nintendo shopping

The new Virtual Boy replica. You slot the Switch into the red part and press your face against the viewport, located on the opposite side. Image: Nintendo

Nintendo is bringing back the Virtual Boy, its failed 1990s virtual reality system, for the Nintendo Switch next year. The company said so today during a big online showcase that drew nearly 600,000 concurrent viewers on YouTube alone.

The Virtual Boy may be Nintendo’s biggest failure. It launched in North America in the summer of 1995 and was scuttled within a year. It was a spin-off to the massively successful portable Game Boy and displayed stereoscopic red (and black) graphics via a goggle interface. By its cancellation, it had a meager library of fewer than two dozen games. According to sales figures from Japanese publication Famitsu, the Virtual Boy sold fewer than 770,000 units in its year of release.

Nintendo used to avoid talking about the Virtual Boy. In 2009, for example, the company’s then-standard press release “About Nintendo” boilerplate rattled off its hardware history, from the 1980s to the present—”Nintendo Entertainment System… the current-generation Wii, Nintendo DS and Nintendo DSi, as well as the Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, Super NES, Nintendo 64 and Nintendo GameCube”—with nary a mention of the Virtual Boy.

But it’s back, and Nintendo is preparing to charge plenty for modern gamers to experience it.

The company said today that a line-up of 14 Virtual Boy games, including Mario’s Tennis, Wario Land, Space Invaders and two versions of Tetris, will begin rolling out to subscribers of the highest trier of Nintendo’s premium subscription service, Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack ($50/year) starting February 17, 2026.

The games will run on a Nintendo Switch or Switch 2 but will require the system to be encased in goggles so that players can see the VR graphics. Nintendo will sell a cardboard version of those goggles for $25 and a plastic one, basically a replica of the original Virtual Boy, for $100.

This won’t be the first time the successful Switch devices potentially redeem the rep of a prior Nintendo failure. The original Switch reintroduced many games originally released for that system’s predecessor, the unpopular Wii U, and helped them find millions of players.

Today’s hour-long Nintendo event also showed a company, which has raised some hardware and accessory prices recently, undeterred by any worries of global economic slowdown.

For starters, Nintendo promoted a deluge of game releases: