Nintendo is finally giving the Virtual Boy, its doomed, mid-’90s stereoscopic 3D console, its due. Virtual Boy games are landing for Switch Online subscribers next month, and the company gave us a little peek at what to expect in the (admittedly small) library. One of the titles coming is called Zero Racers, and if you know your Virtual Boy or your F-Zero lore, it’s mythical.
Zero Racers is a futuristic racing game sort of like F-Zero, in that you pilot anti-gravity ships. However, unlike F-Zero, there is free three-dimensional movement. You can fly up and down, as well as side to side, making it more akin to AeroGauge on the N64. Its courses are all in wireframe—this is the Virtual Boy, after all—but it contains many F-Zero hallmarks, like boosting and requiring the player to finish above a certain position each race to qualify for the next one. And, as far as we know, it was developed internally, by Nintendo itself.
The game never actually released, though. It was previewed multiple times by the media around the latter half of 1996, and has been said to be virtually complete for decades now, but it was shelved presumably because of the Virtual Boy’s commercial failure. The system only lasted a year in North America, and it was quietly discontinued right around the time Zero Racers started getting press coverage. So nobody outside the company has ever played it—though that’ll change later this year.
While the Switch’s Virtual Boy experience launches February 17 with seven games, Zero Racers won’t be among them. Instead, it and another unreleased Virtual Boy game, D-Hopper, are arriving later in 2026.
Virtual Boy – Nintendo Classics – Overview Trailer
Nintendo gives us plenty to complain about, but they also do cool stuff like this that nobody else really does, valuing their history and releasing games that were finished but canceled for one reason or another. The company managed this with Star Fox 2 on the SNES Mini years back, but Star Fox 2 was widely known to exist, and playable ROMs of it were out there, so people could still experience it in an unofficial capacity. Zero Racers, though, was a little-known product on Nintendo’s worst-selling platform that never leaked to the public. There was no way to play it and few screenshots of it, outside of what was published in magazines 30 years ago.
It will be interesting to see if there was a good game under all of that corporate drama. The Virtual Boy is a fascinating, if flawed, system. Rather than using a pair of color LCD screens, which would’ve been very expensive back in the ’90s, it employs a 1×224-pixel LED strip that only lights up red, to save cost. Whatever that strip is showing travels through a magnifying glass, and then bounces off mirrors rotating left to right at an incredibly fast speed to draw an entire frame that appears to be 384 pixels wide. The video below demonstrates all of this with high-speed cameras, and it’s mesmerizing.
How the Virtual Boy Display Works
It was infamous for giving people headaches and was recommended not to be used by young children, giving it a particularly cryptic aura for good old, family-friendly Nintendo. I’ve never played one, so I’m going to spring for that stupidly overpriced Virtual Boy stand that Nintendo is selling, to try and approximate the experience. It’s at least cheaper than snagging a real unit, and has the advantage of not being an absolute PITA to repair because of wonky mirrors.
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