Though the Digital Boy was once each a commercial and serious failure, the console’s infamy is portion of what has made it such an gripping piece of Nintendo’s history. Well-liked items are aloof going for thousands of bucks on bidding web sites, and hobbyists have faith spent years holding the Digital Boy alive through emulation and homebrew games. For a prolonged while, it regarded like Nintendo wished nothing bigger than for the final public to put out of your mind that the Digital Boy ever existed. Nonetheless over time, the corporate has turn into extra chuffed acknowledging and even joking regarding the system through references in games like Ravishing Shatter Bros. Melee, Tomodachi Life, and Luigi’s Mansion three.
Having a detect support on the Nintendo 3DS and additional recent experiments just like the Nintendo Switch and Labo, it wasn’t precisely gleaming to learn that the Digital Boy was once being resurrected as a Switch peripheral designed to be outmoded while taking half in traditional Digital Boy games on Nintendo Switch Online. There’s a nifty poetry to Nintendo’s worst-promoting console being reimagined as a treasure peripheral for its most honorable system of all time. All the things regarding the new Digital Boy’s open speaks to Nintendo being assured sufficient to revisit one of its ideal mess ups and switch it real into a flex that is sort of actually designed to prop up the Switch household of consoles.
After I currently spent some time taking half in with the new Digital Boy, though, Nintendo’s confidence on this $one hundred aspect quest didn’t feel entirely justified. The headset / stand combo is an beautiful piece of retro tech that’s chuffed sufficient to shove your face into. And although I was once roughly hoping to experience some disorienting visible weirdness, the console’s stereoscopic lenses didn’t proceed away me with a headache. Nonetheless there’s a clunkiness to the procedure the Digital Boy’s games performed that made the machine feel extra like an extinct novelty in space of a system I could scrutinize myself spending some serious time with.
The foremost promoting point to this thing is that it’s faithfully re-creating aspects of the true console that labored while smoothing over one of the principal roughness that resulted in it flopping within the ’90s. Nonetheless if retro nostalgia isn’t genuinely your jam, that you just can perhaps must pass on the plastic mannequin and bewitch into consideration dusting off your worn Labo kit.
As any individual who never performed the true Digital Boy and tends to search out VR headsets wretched to position on, I was once pleasantly surprised at how smartly my face fit into the new peripheral, which is supposed to face on a table and be outmoded with a controller after you insert your Nintendo Switch or Switch 2 into it. Unlike my cardboard Labo headset — which was once liable to letting external gentle leak in — the plastic Digital Boy was once ready to tumble me into total darkness while I was once sitting in a smartly-lit tournament apartment.
That darkness made the redness — which could additionally very smartly be custom-made to other colours — of the Digital Boy’s monochromatic sport alternative veil veil pop as I browsed throughout the shrimp library of 3D titles. Nintendo says that by the tip of this 365 days, it plans to open 14 diversified Digital Boy games through its Nintendo Switch Online + Growth Pack subscription equipment, which costs $50 a 365 days for particular particular person accounts and $eighty for household plans. The first batch of Digital Boy games is due out on February seventeenth when the $one hundred peripheral and its more cost-effective $25 cardboard counterpart are being launched.
All over my time with the Digital Boy, I chanced on myself charmed but a little bit underwhelmed while taking half in games like Galactic Pinball, Teleroboxer, and a new port of The Mansion of Innsmouth — a title that had previously handiest been launched in Japan. The games ran completely in truth helpful and regarded like what you might per chance put a question to from some extent in Nintendo’s history when it was once experimenting with a new technique to form its games feel immersive. As spectacular as this lens technology could additionally want been when the true Digital Boy was once launched, it pales in comparability to what Nintendo managed to quit with the 3DS, and it never managed to fully trick my eyes into thinking that I was once taking half in a sport in 3D.
Satirically, it was once extra aesthetically simplistic games with vector graphics like Three-D Tetris and Red Fear that felt like they had been genuinely pulling me in with their original technique to presenting three-dimensional apartment. There’s additionally one thing to be talked about for the proven truth that taking half in these games in any carry out has turn into grand extra hard over time. This new peripheral could additionally not precisely region off a new wave of Digital Boy sport preservation, but this can form them infinitely extra accessible — especially for fogeys who weren’t spherical throughout the true console’s transient lifespan.
Though Nintendo didn’t give me fingers-on time with the cardboard Digital Boy, I got here away grand extra drawn to trying that out and seeing what these games could additionally detect like on a Labo. The plastic mannequin positively looks to be cool and could doubtlessly scratch a particular itch for fogeys that want they’d been ready to have a Digital Boy support within the ’90s. Nonetheless in 2026, these forms of 3D games upright feel moderately too dated to warrant the price of admission ought to you aren’t already paying for an NSO subscription.