At the 1996 Electronic Entertainment Expo, Nintendo showed off a meager slate of games for its Virtual Boy game machine. The early attempt at a 3-D portable gaming platform was unloved by consumers and developers. Nobody knew it at the time, but less than eight months after Virtual Boy hit shelves, it had already seen its final release: Nintendo ended up canceling every game it showed at that E3.
One of those few games was Bound High, an action game that used the 3-D capability of the Virtual Boy hardware to show a ball bouncing up toward the player and down to the floor. The player had to guide the ball character so it landed on enemies and avoided falling into pits. A few years ago, some of the Virtual Boy’s small but dedicated fanbase were able to get their hands on the canceled game’s source code. In 2010, they announced that they were finally able to compile a working ROM file of Bound High, which was then playable for the first time via software emulators. Fourteen years after it died, Virtual Boy’s fans had a new game to play.