Most of you probably don't remember the Nintendo Virtual Boy. Released in 1995 and discontinued the following year, the Virtual Boy was the world's first game console to feature a head-mounted display with stereoscopic 3D graphics. You can think of the Virtual Boy as a very early precursor to more modern VR headsets.
Although VR is slowly becoming more mainstream, back in the '90s, something like the Virtual Boy was beyond niche. It didn't help that the graphics weren't really an improvement over the SNES or PlayStation, which could both at least render colors. It's not hard to see why less than a million Virtual Boys were ever sold.
Still, there are some die-hard Virtual Boy fans out there–mostly video game archivists who just love the weird and wonderful failures that litter gaming's history. For those, the holy grail of the Virtual Boy was Zero Racers, a game that was initially previewed in Nintendo Power and E3 1996, but only as still images. According to Nintendo Life, most had thought Zero Racers to an incomplete prototype that never really made it into production.
However, DidYouKnowGaming? recently spoke to former Nintendo of America associate producer Jim Wornell, who said that Zero Racers wasn't just a prototype. It was actually a fully completed Virtual Boy game.
"Zero Racers was done," said Wornell in an interview. "We had a complete manual, package and label done for the game. It went through LOT check, it had an ESRB rating. It was complete."
Also known as G-Racers, Zero Racers was set in the same universe as F-Zero but with a somewhat more limited cast of characters. Only four vehicles were available with Captain Falcon, James McCloud, and Jody Summer as possible pilots. Summer wouldn't appear in a completed game until the N64's F-Zero X, while James McCloud was only referenced in the Star Fox series as Fox McCloud's father.
The fact that Zero Racers was actually completed means that it’s quite possible Nintendo still has the game files locked away in a data vault somewhere. If so, it wouldn’t be too hard to get an emulator going to actually play the completed game were it to ever see the light of day.
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