Elrinth has recently released a video demoing a few of the Virtual Boy’s homebrew, two-player, link cable games. The Virtual Boy never had any official two-player titles, however there was a link port available on the hardware and romhackers found a two-player mode hidden in Mario Tennis’ code. Since then, members of the homebrew community have created a cable that physically links two VB’s together, unlocked the Mario Tennis code and then started writing their own two player games.
At first, there were just a few proof-of-concept ideas that Elrinth joked about in a satirical way, however while those early homebrew 2p games were primitive, they paved the way for some pretty amazing creations. There’s an impressive port of Street Fighter II that works well with the link cable and another game I really enjoyed, Elevate Speed. There are two more games not shown: Sponge and another impressive racing game Formula V.
I also thought the use of a deepfake AVGN as a guest was pretty funny and Elrinth even got permission from James Rolfe himself to do it! It’s awesome to see the Virtual Boy get some more love…and to see someone who pioneered retro YouTube videos allow Elrinth to add him in! While this video is more silly than informative, I enjoyed it and though fans of the VB might be interested too!
