Virtual Boy Mario Land
Image: Nintendo

A bunch of screenshots from a cancelled Virtual Boy Mario game have recently been discovered and shared online, giving us our best look at the game since it was first advertised back in the 1990s at industry trade shows (h/t: Polygon).

The screenshots were discovered by the Bluesky user rabidrodent and were discovered in a bunch of AOL file directories, accessible through The Internet Archive.

The images in question seem to be promotional shots that were sent to the press at the time to report on the game and have previously surfaced in old magazines and online on lost media sites and wikis. However, to our knowledge, they have never been available in such high quality before, making this a particularly exciting discovery for those who have an interest in the history of the Virtual Boy, or in cancelled games in general.

Online the game is often referred to as VB Mario Land, despite never receiving an official name, and was a proposed title for the Virtual Boy headset that would have featured the classic Mario side-scrolling perspective as well as overhead sections reminiscent of early Zelda titles. It was shown at Winter CES in January 1995 and was teased in magazines over the next year, but was eventually cancelled, with most speculating that the critical and commercial failure of the Virtual Boy was to blame.

Originally released in 1995 in Japan and North America, the Virtual Boy was rushed to market and ended up being critically panned at launch, with many users complaining about the high price, lack of software, and the general discomfort of wearing the stereoscopic 3D headset.

In spite of this, though, it has since gone on to become its own field of interest among video game enthusiasts, many of whom are fascinated by learning more about the hardware's failure, the circumstances that led to its creation, and the games that were planned for the device that never saw the light of day. That includes titles like the one pictured below.

[source bsky.app, via polygon.com]