Two cancelled Virtual Boy games land on Switch next week, thirty years after Nintendo finished them and shelved them. Zero Racers and D-Hopper both arrive on Nintendo Classics on 4 August, for Switch Online plus Expansion Pack members.
Look at everything else Nintendo shipped for that console this week, though, and something stranger emerges.
What the cancelled Virtual Boy games actually are
Zero Racers is a racer that grows straight out of F-Zero. Nintendo’s own description sets it in a future where the 30th century is a decade away. Humanity has declined and moved underground, and what is left of it holds a race.
You fly a floating machine through courses of connected square ducts for five laps. Each lap you have to hold a position inside a set range, and a top three finish moves you on. Passing through rapid marks grants a short burst of high speed.
D-Hopper is the other one, and Intelligent Systems built it, the studio behind Fire Emblem. Prince Dorin falls out of the Sky Kingdom while fleeing a rebellious minister. Fairies rescue him underground, and he sets off to find four missing spirits. He jumps and flaps between floating platforms, and finding a spirit lets him turn into a dragon.
Nintendo finished both for 1996. Then it killed the Virtual Boy after the machine flopped, and these cancelled Virtual Boy games went in a drawer.
The console is getting more this week than it got in its lifetime
Here is the part nobody has joined up. The same update hands the Virtual Boy app a screen colour option, which you reach by holding the right stick and pressing L or R.
On top of that, Nintendo added five Virtual Boy soundtracks to its Nintendo Music app. Virtual Boy Wario Land brings 38 tracks, Teleroboxer 34, Galactic Pinball 28, Mario Clash 22 and Mario’s Tennis 20. That is 142 tracks for a machine most people never touched.
Then there is a brand new Virtual Boy commercial. So in one week the failed console received two games, a display feature, a music library and an advert, as Nintendo Life laid out in detail. Nintendo supported it harder in 2026 than it managed in 1996.
Why the racing one matters most
Of the two, Zero Racers is the one that should make people sit up. It is an F-Zero game that nobody has played, and it is arriving while the series sits largely dormant.
That timing is quietly funny. Fans have spent this summer treating Kirby Air Riders as the closest thing to a modern F-Zero. Now the real article turns up as a thirty year old prototype on a subscription service.
Super Mario Sunshine joins the GameCube library later in August as well. Still, a 2002 classic returning is ordinary. A finished game that nobody could ever buy is not.
For more on that racing comparison, read Kirby Air Riders Boost Explained: Why It’s More Like F-Zero GX Than Mario Kart. Meanwhile Xenoblade Chronicles 2 Switch 2 Release Date and Updates covers another Nintendo revival.
Frequently asked questions
When do they arrive? Both land on 4 August, and you need the Expansion Pack tier.
Is Zero Racers really an F-Zero game? Yes, Nintendo says the series underpins it.
Why did Nintendo shelve them? It dropped the Virtual Boy after the machine failed, so both finished games stayed in the vault.
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