Virtual Boy Works
Year: 2021
Author: Jeremy Parish
Length: 176 pages
A few years ago, I found myself down a YouTube rabbit hole and stumbled across Jeremy Parish’s “Works” series of videos detailing the history of video games. Specifically, he was making videos that chronologically documented the games released for the Nintendo Entertainment System, Game Boy, Super NES, and Sega Genesis. One system that I was able to watch all the way through was his series on the Virtual Boy, Nintendo’s oft-maligned 32-bit console. This book is a written-down version of the scripts from that series.
While I enjoyed the bite-size chapters on each of the 22 games for the system, the few additional chapters on fan games were a nice addition that wasn’t part of the YouTube series. The book also included a pair of blue/red 3D glasses so readers could catch a glimpse of what these games might have been like (it works OK, but it’s no Virtual Boy emulation on a VR headset). Also having some background on the technology between chapters that talked about the games was a nice respite and made me realize how innovative this failed console was for its time.
For what it’s worth, Virtual Boy Works (the book) really just is a printed-out version of the scripts that went into the YouTube videos. Unfortunately, this also meant the formatting wasn’t the greatest for this full-color book. I understand the Virtual Boy aesthetic was very much about red and black, but printing an entire book with this color scheme made it a little hard to read—which was ironic given the Virtual Boy’s notorious eye strain issues. The formatting of the text also didn’t feel quite polished despite the high-quality photos of the games that were included in each chapter. Still, it’s a nice book to have with my video game collection even if I don’t actually own anything from the Virtual Boy.
A nice collection of YouTube scripts about one of gaming’s most spectacular failures, I give Virtual Boy Works 3.5 stars out of 5.
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