Cancelled Super Mario Game Images Found For Failed Nintendo Virtual Boy Device
Long-lost images showcasing a cancelled Mario title for the Nintendo Virtual Boy recently surfaced on the Bluesky social media site. Bluesky user, rabidrodent, shared details on a huge amount of content and links they discovered in an AOL directory via the Internet Archive, including high-quality images of the forgotten Mario game.
Released in 1994, the Virtual Boy was promoted as the first mass market VR device, and involved a headset that displayed striking red graphics against a black background. The Virtual Boy Mario game doesn’t have an official name, as far as anyone can confirm, with most people simply referring to it as VB Mario Land. However, rabidrodent does note another possible title.
“Perhaps the best part of this directory is the screenshots for ‘Mario Smash’, the cancelled Mario game for Virtual Boy,” rabidrodent said in their Bluesky post.
“These are VERY high quality and high resolution. The pixels are clean enough, someone could accurately recreate them all in pixel art with some patience.”
Virtual Failure
The Virtual Boy (VB) is considered Nintendo’s biggest failure. Released in 1994, it was marketed as being the first consumer Virtual Reality device despite not actually being VR (it used dual monitors and wireframe graphics to simulate a 3D effect). It sold 770,000 units and was pulled from sale in 1996. It likely didn’t help that it was known to cause headaches, eye and neck strain.
These issues and more were covered in an interview published on the official Nintendo site in 2011. In the Iwata Asks series, Satoru Iwata (President and CEO of Nintendo at the time) spoke with Shigesato Itoi (creator of the Mother game series, known as EarthBound in the US) and Shigeru Miyamoto (the game designer responsible for multiple series, such as Donkey Kong and Zelda) about Nintendo’s 3D tech, including the VB.
“It was the kind of toy to get you excited and make you think, ‘This is what we can do now!’ I imagined it as something that people who were on the lookout for new entertainment or who could afford to spend a bit of money could buy and enjoy even if the price was a little expensive,” said Miyamoto. “But the world treated it like a successor to the Game Boy system.”
“I’m not sure how to put it, but there was no way for the Virtual Boy game console to permeate daily life,” Itoi said.
“Put another way, Nintendo’s products were entertainments that had always been able to enter into everyday life. There isn’t anything particularly strange about viewing Virtual Boy as a slightly unusual toy that you can enjoy apart from everyday life, but when lined up with Nintendo’s other products, I imagine it didn’t quite fit in.”
“In other words, Nintendo is a company that, when it hits the mark, sells 10 million of something. If you don’t sell that much, it’s considered a failure.”
Mario on The Virtual Boy
The interview also touches on how other consoles, like the NES, had help with their success via the inclusion of Mario games. However, the Virtual Boy did ship with its own exclusive title: Mario Tennis.
Mario Smash/VB Mario Land may well have been Nintendo’s attempt at a more typical Mario platformer, albeit one with the ability to move between the foreground and background, a mechanic since used in other titles such as the recent Super Mario Bros. Wonder, from 2023.
In total, 22 official games were released for the VB between 1995 and 1996. In an interview with Puget Sound Business Journal in May 1995, the boss of Nintendo of America (NOA) Howard Lincoln spoke about the lack of decent titles and his hopes at the time:
“We finally have the games that could push Virtual Boy along. It’s been disappointing. We haven’t been able to come up with that killer application.”
However, several years later in a Reddit AMA on Sept. 24, 2012, when asked about the VB, he said: “Everyone at NOA thought it was goofy and gimmicky, which it was. The tech was cool but the game playing experience was untenable.”
Experimental Toys
The VB had a striking design and distinctive visuals, echoed in the red googles and black two-handed controller, but the fact players had to sit and lean into the device rather than actually wear it was a design flaw that couldn’t be overlooked.
There’s a regular opinion shared these days that the VB was more like a prototype that made it to market, which makes it even more tragic as it was the final product designed by Gunpei Yokoi before his resignation. Yokoi helped create the Game And Watch, Game Boy, Dr. Mario game, and the largely forgotten R.O.B. (Robotic Operating Buddy).
This was sold by Nintendo as a robot that could play with and against gamers on its other game systems, but only actually worked with two games (Stack-Up and Gyromite) and was discontinued in 1990, four years before the VB hit shelves.
As for the Virtual Boy, it’s still popular with a certain kind of retro console enthusiast, to the extent that it’s now possible to find replacement parts, like the ribbon that connects the googles to the motherboard, created by dedicated modders.
Nintendo also hasn’t completely sidelined it, as Nintendo’s Japanese museum (which opened in October 2024) sells Virtual Boy merchandise. As such, it’s also possible the San Francisco Nintendo store will have VB items.
There was also an April Fool’s video that paired the device with the Switch, which had VR accessories (VR has not been confirmed for Switch 2 as of this writing). However, none of this can compete with the official Virtual Boy trailer from 1995.
