In 2018, a tiny news item announced something delightful: a brand-new game for the Virtual Boy, Nintendo’s red-and-black 1995 misfit, was in development. The truth, as it unfolded over the next eight years, is stranger and sadder and more interesting than the announcement — Yan’s World is a puzzle platformer about a pillow-throwing onion, it was really a PC game wearing the Virtual Boy’s colours, and the actual Virtual Boy version died as a Kickstarter stretch goal. This is the story of the most charming almost in homebrew.
An onion, a pillow, and a hundred traps
Start with the game itself, because it’s a lovely idea. Yan’s World is a puzzle platformer whose hero is an onion — and whose weapon of choice is a pillow, hurled at enemies in the grand tradition of platform heroes making do with whatever’s softest. The footage that circulated in the scene press showed what kind of platformer it wanted to be: trap-strewn gauntlets of spikes and hazards, the sort of levels Indie Retro News described as built by “some mad person pushing the player to the brink” — Super Mario Maker cruelty with a Virtual Boy accent.
The team behind it, People Please, had been building it since 2016, entirely as a passion project. Their pitch, when the game resurfaced in 2020, is worth hearing in their own words: “For the last few years, we have been working on a passion project, one that is the first of its kind, a Virtual Boy homebrew project.”
Which raises the obvious question: why the Virtual Boy, of all machines?
The console that refuses to stay dead
The Virtual Boy is gaming’s most famous beautiful failure. Launched in 1995 under Game Boy creator Gunpei Yokoi, it promised true 3D and delivered it in exactly two colours — red and black — through a tabletop headset that gave players neck aches and, legend insists, headaches. Nintendo discontinued it within about a year. Only 22 games were ever released for it. By every commercial measure, it was a catastrophe.
And yet it will not die, because a library of 22 games is not a catalogue — it’s an unfinished sentence. The Virtual Boy has one of the most devoted homebrew scenes in retro gaming, full of developers who look at those 22 games and see a console still waiting for the library it deserved. Every few years another team announces the game that will finally fill the shelf: a racer, a fighter, a platformer. When word of Yan’s World spread in February 2018 — graphic artist Neweegee surfacing early footage, homebrew press picking it up — Virtual Boy owners heard exactly what they wanted to hear: a fresh platform game, made for the machine, twenty-three years after Nintendo gave up on it.
That’s the announcement this post carried in 2018. It was reported in good faith, everywhere it appeared. It just wasn’t quite the whole story.
The stretch-goal twist
Here’s the whole story, as the platform’s own archive, Planet Virtual Boy, records it today: Yan’s World is a Virtual Boy–inspired game for PC. The screenshots that look so perfectly Virtual Boy — the reds, the blacks, the chunky HUD — are the PC game wearing its hero console’s palette as a tribute. A port to actual Virtual Boy hardware was planned, but as a stretch goal: something that would happen if the game’s crowdfunding did well enough.
In October 2020, People Please took Yan’s World to Kickstarter. The campaign failed. The stretch goal died with it, and — harder still — so, apparently, did the momentum for the main game: Yan’s World has been on hiatus ever since, its pillow-throwing onion still waiting for a world to be thrown into.
It would be easy to file this under vapourware and move on. That misses what’s actually poignant about it. Nobody scams their way into a Virtual Boy tribute. A team spent four years building a love letter to the most mocked console Nintendo ever made, aimed it at the one audience guaranteed to care, and asked that audience to fund it — and there simply weren’t enough of them, which is, in the end, exactly the Virtual Boy’s original problem too. The console that couldn’t find its audience in 1995 couldn’t quite find it in 2020 either.
The afterlife that made Yan possible
Yan’s World didn’t appear in a vacuum — it surfaced because the 2010s quietly turned the Virtual Boy from punchline to muse. Emulation got good; flash carts let homebrew run on real hardware; and in 2024 the scene produced Red Viper, a Virtual Boy emulator for the Nintendo 3DS that plays the library in genuine stereoscopic 3D on the one Nintendo handheld that could do the original justice. A console mocked for thirty years for its display turned out to have been waiting for displays to catch up. Developers raised on that renaissance started asking the homebrew scene’s favourite question — what would a new one look like? — and Yan’s World, red to its bones, was one of the answers. It matters that People Please aimed the tribute at the faithful first: the Virtual Boy community is small, but it is the kind of small that shows up.
Where Yan sleeps now
As of today, Yan’s World remains on hiatus — no release, no revival announcement, the onion still mid-dream. But it earned its place in the record all the same. The Virtual Boy’s story is usually told as a punchline about red lines and eye strain. Its afterlife tells a better one: a machine so peculiar that, decades later, talented people were still volunteering years of their lives to make it one more game — even if, in the end, the game they made was a portrait of the machine rather than a cartridge for it.
Nintendo made 22 Virtual Boy games. The fans keep almost making the 23rd. Yan’s World is the most charming of the almosts — and if People Please ever wake it up, the Virtual Boy shelf, and this site, will be ready.
Yan’s World is by People Please, in development from 2016; its Kickstarter campaign ran in October 2020 and the project has been on hiatus since. Status per Planet Virtual Boy, the platform’s homebrew archive. This article keeps the post’s original URL and March 2018 date.