My Experience with the Virtual Boy

Because I had recently started a new paper route and had direct access to the money I earned, I had began buying more video games and hardware. I started saving up for what I assumed would be the new craze – the Virtual Boy. I read about it mainly from Nintendo Power and was planning on getting one. I was a little put off by the red monochrome, but still wanted one. To get myself used to how the VB would look, I played Game Boy games on the Super Game Boy, but made the colors black and 3 shades of red to match what I had seen from screenshots in magazines.

I had saved up almost enough money, but because I had been getting into card collecting and comics at the time, I was short about $20. It turns out that my family would be in Boise at a family party on the day of the release, which worked out well in my favor. Growing up in the small town I lived in, I was used to our stores and theaters not getting things on release dates. But I would have to have all the money that day. I managed to talk my friend Jake into lending me $20 to get the VB on release day, and in exchange, he would get to keep and play it until I paid him back.

Part of the way through the family get-together, my dad agreed to take me to Fred Meyer. We bought the VB and returned to my grandma’s house. I set it up and played it for a bit. My uncles and a few cousins all took a quick peek at it but didn’t seem super impressed. I tried to play it on the way home, but it wasn’t really meant to be portable, so I had to wait until I got home.

Since it came with Mario’s Tennis, and it was the only game I had, I was forced to play tennis, but I learned how tennis worked for the first time in my life. Occasionally I played it by laying in bed and resting the unit on my face, but most of the time I had it set up on my desk in my room.

As soon as I got paid for the next month, I paid Jake back and got Red Alarm, an airplane game. This was the game I was most excited for, as I was a fan of airplane/flight simulator games. I liked it, but wished that things weren’t just a wire frame.

It usually ran on 6 AA batteries, but I wanted an AC adapter so I didn’t have to replace batteries all the time, having gone through that issue with the Super Scope a couple years earlier. The AC adapter was $20, and I was short on the cash, having just paid back Jake and bought Red Alarm and some comics. So I kinda pulled the same stunt with my friend Travis. He lent me the money to get the AC adapter and in exchange he got to keep the VB for a couple weeks until I got the cash. The actual cord was identical to a SNES cord, but required the adapter to attach it to the Virtual Boy controller. 

The only other game I bought for it was Golf. So officially that means that 2/3 of my games for it were sports games, technically. None of the other games that were available at Wal-Mart/K-Mart seemed interesting at the time, and I was itching to get another game for the VB to have a little variety. As a golf game, it was on par (ha!) with all of the other modern golf games, but it made me wish that it had a green screen instead of red.

After the novelty of it wore off, I started playing it less and less often. The neck/eye strain combined with the fact that the games weren’t anything special started to wear on me.

Eventually, I put it back into its box, which I had kept. I would pull it out here and there, but the stand cracked at the spot where the two legs hinged, forcing me to play it balanced on my face. I threw the stand away, but I should have at least kept the small connector piece. There are a lot of DIY stand suggestions online, but they all require having that particular piece, unfortunately.

Much later, I got a gift from my friend Michael. He was in Japan, and had seen some sort of clearance bin that had VB games for cheap. He bought V-Tetris, a Japanese-only release. It had regular Tetris, as well as a version that had a 3-D version with a rotatable base – sorta like putting Tetris pieces inside of a drinking glass.

[not actually me]

It sat in its box for years, but I would pull it out every so often to show someone. One time I was showing my son the VB but it wasn’t working correctly. The picture was messed up, kind of reminding me of what happened to NES games when there was a little dust on the contacts. I tried cleaning it but it didn’t help anything. As it turns out, this was a common problem with old Virtual Boys. The ribbons that connected the motherboard to the displays on either side were glued together. After about 8 to 10 years, the glue dried out and cracked, allowing the ribbon to separate which messes up the display and causes it to draw horizontal lines over parts of the screen.

Years later, a group of Nintendo enthusiasts I belong to were having a little “Nintendo Museum,” showing every system ever made. Nobody but me had a VB, so it was up to me to bring mine. I went online to see if I could find a solution to the line problem. I learned about the cracked glue problem, and read that one solution was to heat up the glue to re-attach the ribbon. I had to make a special tool to remove the security screws that all Nintendo systems use by taking a screwdriver and grinding out the middle. Once I got them out, I followed a tutorial from YouTube to fix it. I replaced the screws with regular Phillips-head screws to make future repairs easier. I also bought a 3-D printed clip that allows me to connect the Virtual Boy to a standard camera tripod so that I can play it as it was intended, but now with a lot more versatility in adjusting the height and angle so that it doesn't cause the neck/back strain it did originally. 

Somehow I also had lost my copy of Mario's Tennis, so I purchased a used one from eBay to replace it. Finally, I found someone who is able to solder the lenses to the ribbon cable, thus eliminating the cracked glue problem for good. In early 2023, I found a website that sold replacement stands that are nearly indistinguishable from the genuine article. It even came with a cross brace to prevent the exact problem that plagued these stands from occurring again, and it was a 10-cent piece of plastic - something Nintendo probably should have thought about including originally. Between new screws, new clip, a replacement game, and the soldering job, I have probably spent as much on restoring/maintaining my Virtual Boy as I did purchasing it originally.