Released back in 1995, Nintendo's virtual reality system, the Virtual Boy, is regularly regarded online as one of the company's biggest failures, due to its low sales and a string of other problems that plagued the device at release.
This ranged from the lack of games, to the discomfort of actually wearing the red and black headset, to its relatively high price point ($179.99) that turned away potential buyers, and prevented it from becoming yet another hit for the legendary video game manufacturer.
However, despite the console's flaws, that hasn't stopped a passionate community from rallying around the ill-judged system in recent years, to dig up more information on potential games for the console that never saw the light day. Which leads us nicely to the topic of today's article — the recent discovery of a ROM for the unreleased Virtual League Baseball 2, which was announced on the website Planet Virtual Boy earlier this month.
Virtual League Baseball 2 was intended to be the sequel to Kemco's original Virtual League Baseball for the Virtual Boy, released in 1995. This was a game that ended up getting mostly middling reviews from critics, like GamePro, back when it originally debuted, who praised the "impressive 3D graphics", but ended up criticising the "archaic controls" and "awful" sound effects.
Development on the sequel seems to have begun immediately after the first game was released, and was only really known about thanks to a preview for the game being published in a December 1995 issue of Weekly Famicom Tsūshin 363 featuring a solitary screenshot, and the existence of an ESRB rating for the title. But, as history tells us, it was seemingly abandoned sometime later, with most speculating that the failure of the console was the cause of its cancellation.
In 2023, a user named captainbubbaloo posted some images of a devcart for the game on Reddit, stating that he got the chance to play the game as it belonged to a regular customer at his job. This prompted a commenter related to the Planet Virtual Boy site to suggest they could "crowd source some money to help compensate" captainbubbaloo for helping them dump its contents.
Very little information was shared online about how these talks progressed. However, all of a sudden, earlier this month, an individual named ThrownAway posted a blog on the Planet Virtual Boy website, claiming that they have now acquired the ROM for the game and intend to release it publicly on September 21st, 2025.
In this blog, ThrownAway states they have been "sworn to keep quiet about all details" and that they "will not be answering any further questions about the acquisition of the ROM", revealing only that it came from a "former game tester". As a result, it's unknown whether this is related to the previous attempt to acquire the game, or is an entirely different copy that previously unknown.
According to ThrownAway, acquiring the ROM hasn't been "cheap", so the team are currently accepting donations on PayPal to try and "ease some of the financial burden we have incurred from this purchase". The exact price they acquired the ROM for has also not been revealed.