Three screenshots of the Mario franchise’s unreleased Virtual Boy outing have resurfaced online, giving us the best look at the game anyone’s seen since 1995.
The images were discovered hiding out in The Internet Archive by Bluesky user rabidrodent, specifically in a folder of video game screenshots pulled from old AOL file libraries. They appear to be official assets distributed by Nintendo to the press for use in reporting on the game, so it’s not as if no one has ever seen them before. That said, this is probably the first time these specific images have been available to the public in this clean a form in decades, and we love to see it.
Nintendo showed “VB Mario Land,” as the game is known colloquially despite having never received an official name, just once at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in January 1995. Reports from the time indicate attendees weren’t actually able to play the game or even view it through a Virtual Boy, but were shown a demo of the first level on widescreen TVs while wearing special glasses to simulate the console’s 3D effects.
VB Mario Land would have seen Mario traversing both sidescrolling and top-down levels, with plane-hopping mechanics similar to those that would eventually be seen in Virtual Boy Wario Land. It’s unclear why Nintendo never released the game, but many attribute the near-immediate failure of the Virtual Boy to its disappearance, making the odd device the one Nintendo console to not receive a traditional Mario experience.
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