My PS3 Preordering Adventure0
Matt posted in Playstation 3 on October 12th, 2006

So, as most of you are probably aware, EB Games and Gamestop had preorders for the Playstation 3 Tuesday morning. The news was only announced Monday. The first I heard of it was through the gamestop mailing list. I called four EB stores as well as gamestops close to my apartment. The first one I called said they were doing it, and they had 16 units to give out. I couldn’t get through to the second and third stores. One didn’t answer the phone and the other’s line was busy. (I did call back to no avail) Another store said they would call me if I preordered a PS3 title, so I put $5 down. I called up that store to ask about their deal, and they said, “call back tomorrow.” I told them that I already heard from another EB Games that they are doing preorders tomorrow. He said they were only calling people who preordered a PS3 title about the deal. I told him I had preordered a title, and he said they were allowing preorders tomorrow morning. I asked why I hadn’t received a call, and he said he was going to try to get them done before he left today. Otherwise, he’d call tomorrow. I certainly wasn’t going to wait around to get called (and they did not call me anyway). I was hoping that the information wouldn’t get spread all over the web until Tuesday or at least late Monday, but soon, gamestop.com put it on their website, and Joystiq and Kotaku both had posts about it. So much for trying to reward people for reserving games and signing up for their mailing list. I am rather busy with work, so I wasn’t really planning on spending the whole night in line. On my way home from work at about 12:20 am, I checked out the line at the EB by my house. There were already 12 people camping out. I figured if I had any chance to get a PS3 at launch, I’d have to start waiting now. The only problem was I was still wearing shorts and a T-shirt since I came from work, and it was going to be a bit of a chilly night. I called my friend, and he was kind enough to bring a sleeping bag, blankets some snacks and a DS to keep me occupied. I certainly wasn’t going to leave for fear of losing my place in line. I was 13th, and that’s very close to 14, which may be how many they are giving out to customers since the employees can buy 2. (I don’t know if the 16 included the 2 for the employees or not, but I didn’t want to find out on launch day)

My friends stayed from about 1 to 2 am chatting, so that was pretty cool. Then, I figured I’d try and get some sleep. I have trouble sleeping in my own bed, and this certainly was not a good sleeping environment. Cement is unfortunately rather hard, and the sleeping bag wasn’t able to soften it enough. It was rather ironic that there was a mattress store right next to the EB games with big comfy beds on display taunting me all night. There were very bright lights in the parking lot that made sleeping much more difficult too. Although I am eternally grateful to my friends for bringing me some supplies, the sleeping bag I was using was  rather hot. It was rated to be comfortable at -20 degrees Fahrenheit. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make it comfortable at 50 degrees Fahrenheit. If I unzipped it, I’d be too cold. Otherwise I felt like I was roasting in an oven. The EB Games I waited at (Overland and Venice Blvd) is by the 405, and Venice Blvd is rather busy also, so the traffic noises weren’t relaxing. There were other noises like a very old woman with a very squeaky small cart that slowly pushed it across the parking lot in the middle of the night. I thought it was rather odd for her to be out that late because it was 3 am or something like that, but I didn’t question her about it.

I ended up getting a half an hour of sleep from about 4 am to 4:30 am. That was it. There is a Ballys close by, and apparently there’s a mad rush to get there at 5 am. By about 7:30 am, everyone started putting away their camping equipment, bedding, etc and forming a line since a lot of people were showing up in the morning. The EB games guy showed up at 9 am, and said they were going to let 3 people in at a time. They didn’t have the SKU to reserve Wiis, but they were going to reserve them anyway if you put $50 down. (They marked you down as reserving Sonic, but they were going to transfer the balance over when they got the SKU) People from IGN showed up to see how things were going. Apparently, their office is right across from the Best Buy that is in the same complex as the EB. They were nice and gave out IGN shirts. They took a lot of pictures, which I can be seen in. All of them are here: (I’m the one with red shoes that looks half dead)

 

I look terrible as most people with 1/2 hour of sleep do, but for most of the other pictures, I at least tried to pose.

I’m also peeking my head out in the back on kotaku, but I’m not as visible as I would have liked. I thought it was really amusing that one guy asked the guy who went over to talk to IGN where Jessica Chobot was. It turned out that the guy had already asked the IGN people, and apparently she was on G4 that morning. If you don’t recognize the name, I don’t blame you. Jessica Chobot is a reporter at IGN, but she’s female, so that has made gained her a lot of notoriety in the gaming community I guess. I don’t really have a desire to meet her, but if I did, I’d ask her why she was so nice to Uwe Boll in the dinner with Uwe feature. She didn’t treat him like the criminal he is. The dinner is like an hour long, so I imagine she didn’t want to tear into him at the beginning, but  she could have at least told him that his movies sucked at the very end of the interview. I can’t imagine anyone at IGN liked any of those films, so they should have told Uwe how bad they are and watched him complain about how everyone was unfair. He certainly did complain about people on the internet being unfair, and Jessica agreed with him instead of telling him how right they are about his poor excuses for films. I should try and train in boxing, so the next time he wants to beat up his critics I can give him what’s coming to him. Too bad I have better things to do than beating the crap out of bad directors. But, I digress.

Several people in line were much more excited about the Wii, yet they still wanted to pick up a PS3. One guy was buying a PS3, so he could ebay it and get a Wii from his profits, but most people weren’t really interested in ebaying it at the EB I waited at, which was reassuring. That or they were denying it to avoid a potential lynching. I’d feel really bad if I didn’t get one, and everyone who did put it up on ebay to make a quick buck. People are already ebaying the PS3s guaranteed at launch, although it seems stupid because they aren’t guaranteed to get it. Looking at the numbers, EB games only preordered 28,800 and 57,600 units nationwide at 3,600 stores, it seems reasonable to expect that EB Games and Gamestop will be able to get that many, but who knows. Apparently, the EB games I preordered at didn’t get any Xbox 360s at launch due to some sort of mistake. So, anyone who spends over a thousand dollars on something they aren’t guaranteed to get at launch isn’t very prudent.

People kept showing up from 9:30 am to10:30 am, and they seemed genuinely surprised that they wouldn’t be able to get a PS3. These people were in the older crowd, so I imagine that they were buying for their children and weren’t in touch with the gamer news. It’s a bit hard to feel sorry for them though after waiting in line for 10 hours and only getting a half an hour of sleep. I was able to preorder my PS3 with no problem. I was unsure which PS3 I’d have a better chance getting, the 20 gig or the 60 gig. Since the cheaper model has HDMI and all the parts are upgradeable, I don’t really feel like paying an extra $100 if I don’t have to. All you get is 40 extra gig, card readers I’m never going to use (PS3 doesn’t have a PS2 card slot built in, which is what I’m really interested in, although they are selling that), and I’d rather use wired since I have a switch downstairs for my Xbox and 360 already. Once I fill my hard disk up, I can probably swap in a huge, fast hard disk for cheaper than $100 and have the coolest PS3 on the block. The guy behind the counter (as well as another guy who preordered) seemed shocked, and they tried to persuade me otherwise, but I stuck to my guns once I found out no one else reserved a 20 gig. That way, if any 20 gigs come into the store (which is likely), I’ll be the first they call about it.

Reserving a Wii was a bit more of an ordeal because they were only planning on letting the people who they called reserve it, but I told them I reserved a game at a different EB (which is true) and that EB didn’t call me about the Wii either (which is also true). They talked it over and agreed that they’d let me preorder it. They said they only had 20, and once those were gone, that was all they were taking for the Wii at this point. Since there is over twice the numbers of Wiis planned to ship to North America than PS3s, you’d think they’d at least reserve 32, but I guess it was before they were officially supposed to reserve them, so it seems reasonable that they were reluctant. Finally, after 10 hours of waiting, I was able to preorder both systems. Since we are very busy at work presently, I took a shower, got in my car, drove for a half an hour to work, and ended up at work at 11:15 am. It was a bit tough working on 1/2 an hour of sleep, but I’ve worked through the night a few times, so I could deal with it. I put in about 10 hours of work before I went home to catch up on some rest. I talked to a co-worker, and he said he got one by showing up at 7:00 am at a EB games up in Ventura. That was a bit frustrating because I had to go through a terrible ordeal to get mine, but at least I was able to preorder one. There were people who showed up to the EB games where I camped out at 7 am, and they certainly did not get a PS3. Was it worth waiting? I think so. It will be if I get it at launch. I’m not convinced I will, but I can hope.

So You Want To Be A Game Programmer? How to get out of college and into games9
Matt posted in Getting into Games on October 9th, 2006

This article originally appeared in the 2005 Game Developer’s Game Career Guide.

By Matt Gilgenbach and Daniel Sass

How do you get started in the game industry right out of college?
This task is not a particularly easy one mostly because a lot of people want to do the same thing and there are only a limited number of junior positions available for fresh college graduates.
From our years in the game industry, and from what we observe of junior-level programmers and designers today, we’ve put together some basic information on how you might break into the industry straight out of college. If you want to make yourself stand out in the sea of inexperience, you need four things:
• a tight demo
• a clean and professional resume
• some experience
• a pragmatic idea of what to expect.

The demo
Finish your game or demo. When something is finished, it shows persistence, a trait that’s absolutely crucial to have to work in this industry.
“Finished” doesn’t mean the demo meets your original goal of creating a complete game that rivals the current latest and greatest game. What “finished” does mean is that the game is fully functional and relatively bug free. Hence, this usually means you have to scale back your vision.
If your original vision was to create a 3D platformer with many levels and bosses, and your final product has only one level, that’s okay. As long as that one level is totally complete and shows off your programming skills, it will be fine for a demo.
If you don’t have an artistic inclination or know any artists, it’s difficult to make a game or even a level. However, you can still work on technology. The one thing that’s important to prospective employers is that you have a demo that shows off your programming prowess and technology (and that you have the persistence to finish it). But even if you write an engine that’s better than the hottest game out there, no one is going to pay any attention to it if you only send them the source code or a demo that displays just five polygons.
Make your demo impressive. Most people who will evaluate your demo have a very short period of time to look at it, so make sure they will immediately know what’s cool about it. If you write a complicated object modeler that rivals a professional 3D modeling package, no one will invest the time into seeing the features unless you point them out. If you want to show off your modeling program, then make sure the demo starts with an impressive model that was created in your package.
Make your demo as easy as possible to view. Something that should be obvious, but that a lot of people overlook, is to make it as easy as possible to get at your demo.
The whole point of having a resume is to convince the potential employer that your demos are worth looking at—and once you’ve convinced them to view the demos, you need to make them as easily accessible as possible.
The people who receive your resume also receive hundreds of others, and they aren’t going to give you much time. Don’t waste the precious time they do give you by making them navigate a bunch of pages or folders to get at something that might impress them. Often, snail mailing your demo on a CD is the easiest way to get your demo viewed. When job screeners have an actual CD sitting on their desks, it’s quite easy for them to pop it in their computer and view it, unlike job candidates who direct them to a web site to download a potentially large (and potentially infected) file.
If you don’t want to mail your demo on CD, make sure your resume has a direct link to download the demos, as opposed to making the reviewers navigate your page to find it.
Do not show off standardized class projects. Your demo should not be a class project for which everyone did the same thing. If your class project was to create the Utah Teapot from splines, then your work isn’t particularly impressive; anyone who passed the class did the job just as well. Standardized class projects often downplay your unique talents and skills.
However, if you encountered more open-ended assignments, like “make a good video game” or “complete a project involving computer graphics,” then your project—by its very nature—has an opportunity to express something about you and your abilities.
Specifically tell the screeners what code in the demo is your own. Here’s one of the worst scenarios that can occur during an interview: You play a demo, which only shows off graphics, and you proudly say you were the game designer.
You can only impress the people looking at your demo by showing them the work you did. It isn’t impressive if you (as aspiring programmer) show a great looking demo from a graphics standpoint if you either used an existing graphics engine or had someone else write the graphics code. They will assume you aren’t very good with graphics, thus marking a point against you where you shouldn’t even have been assessed.
Instead, try to write at least a few, if not all, of the important components of your demo—graphics, animation, collision, physics, and AI—to show that you have expertise in various aspects of video game development.
Remember, you will be asked about your specific contributions to the demos you show. Be prepared to answer questions about them. And never, ever say, “I don’t remember how I did that.”

Experience
Have relevant work experience. Getting that first job in the industry is hard. Many people inside the industry feel like it’s completely different from all other software development jobs and, to a certain extent, it’s true. However, you still need to have experience to land your first gig. And there are many types of positions you can pursue.
First, if you are at a big university, there’s probably a graphics research project at your school. Try to become a research assistant, which will help you gain basic work experience, like project management skills, a deadline-oriented attitude, and, most of all, a professional reference. If there isn’t a graphics research project, then find a different research project and convince the professor that the project will benefit from 3D visualization. Computer graphics are very useful for a lot of different types of research because the same experiment can look much more successful with good data visualization—and if you can convince a professor of this point, you’ll also gain experience at persuading others of the value of your talents.
Get an internship with a game developer. Some larger game development companies will provide internships for eager students. Don’t expect to do glamorous work or even to get paid. However, this internship experience will both get you real world game programming experience and help you network with game developers.
The Game Career Guide from last year (2004) contains some valuable details about internships in the development community. Gamasutra.com also hosts listings for available internships (as well as part- and full-time positions).
Get professional team experience. Software development experience at a commercial software developer is also very useful. You may not be working on something exciting like graphics, but you will earn good and valuable work experience. Completing an internship in software development demonstrates that you have some level of general programming competency.
And I know what you are thinking: “My demos should show that and more!” Well, having commercial software development experience can also show that you can function well on a team, which is something a demo can’t prove. We are long past the days when one person can create an entire console game, so a lot of your time in the game industry will be spent dealing with other people. Commercial software development experience is useful because you deal with managers, schedules, and ship dates, all of which are totally relevant in the game industry. Even if you created your demo with a team, everyone else you worked with was more or less on the same level, so that experience doesn’t really show how well you interact with different people of various levels of expertise, people who are unmotivated or determined, flexible or stubborn, and so forth. Sometimes people who can put together the most impressive demo on their own are no good in a team environment because they can’t take orders from someone else.
An ideal internship for an aspiring game developer nowadays would be one in which you would develop commercial software that has artificial intelligence or 3D graphical components. You may not think there are many of that nature, but keep looking. You may be surprised at what you find.
While it’s good to have software development experience, don’t be fooled into believing that years of non-game experience translates into an equal number of years of game development experience, as most companies do not treat them the same. Even if you manage to get two years of non-game experience during your college years, don’t expect to enter into a company at the same level as someone who has two years of solid game programming experience. While an internship can help you get in the door, it won’t get you higher up the ladder or allow you to skip taking an entry-level position.
Learn on your own. Even if your college has the greatest game programming classes of any school in the world, you are not ready to get an entry-level programming position with this background alone. You need to learn to program on your own.
Being a self-taught learner is important for many reasons. First, it separates you from your classmates. Your classmates may have just gone through the curriculum, but ideally you went through it and much more since you were actively pursuing your interests in game development in your spare time. Supplementing your education with self-taught knowledge will separate your resume instantly from your classmates’—even if you’re all from a prestigious school. Second, learning on your own shows you are personally motivated to learn about game development—the reason you’re learning game development goes beyond getting good grades. People who work in this industry don’t have teachers or curricula. Often, they are asked to do something for their jobs that not one person in the company has experience doing. Hence, if you can prove in your resume, cover letter, and interview that you are an avid, self-taught programmer, you should.

Resume
If you don’t want to be asked about it, don’t list it. Do not put classes or skills on your resume that you don’t want to discuss in an interview. If you get a phone screening by a game development company, usually they start by discussing your resume. If you took a class and didn’t succeed at it, didn’t like it, or didn’t understand it, do not list it on your resume. The class you dreaded could be your interviewer’s pet interest, and he or she might want to ask you all about it. Not knowing much about something on your resume looks much worse than if it wasn’t there to begin with.
Don’t lie … really. Do not say that you were “project lead” or “CEO” of a company. In college, many people create a “company” or lead a small team of people who are making games.
While you may be very proud of your accomplishments, the people looking at your resume could very well be CEOs and project leads—and they know you don’t have the same kind of experience they have. In fact, an over-exaggeration on your part might even be perceived as slightly insulting on their parts.
Lying, over-exaggerating, or including too many self-promoting titles on your resume makes it seem like you have a big ego and think your accomplishments are more substantial than they really are. For example, don’t list that you’ve been programming since you were 10 years old; even if it’s true, you won’t be taken seriously.
To avoid over-exaggerations and egotism, separate your resume into multiple sections, such as work experience and personal projects—that way, you can still list your personal achievements, but they are just that: personal, not professional. Games that you worked on for fun in college should go into personal projects, unless you actually made a decent amount of money selling them as shareware. If you were part of team management and you think that the experience will help you, then describe your accomplishments in a less direct way by saying, for example, “carried out some managerial tasks on project” to avoid giving the impression that you have a big ego.
Don’t waste space with non-relevant experience. You want to fill as much of the paper with experience that you think will get you into games, so don’t put non-technical jobs on your resume. If you’ve never had a technical job, then you likely need more experience before applying to a job in game development.
Do not pitch. Do not under any circumstances say you have great game ideas that you would like to sell. Everyone thinks they have great game ideas, but no company is interested in buying them from a job applicant. Your resume will go right to the recycle bin.
Also, you don’t need to tell the screeners and potential employers that you are a “fast” programmer at a software development job—you had better be fast in a regular software engineer position because the standards in game programming are much higher. Remember that a large portion of your graduating class wants to work in games. The competition is intense. Game development jobs go to those who can get the job done accurately and quickly.
Don’t tell the screeners that you can quickly learn new programming languages, libraries, or SDKs—that’s another basic requirement, and not just in game development, but in software development as a whole, and your resume experience should show it.

What to expect
Programmer test. Sometimes a company will give you a programmer test before they’ll bring you into an interview. Usually designed to see if you are worth bringing in for an in-house interview, these tests vary from company to company, so there’s no standard way to prepare for them. If the interviewer informs you that you are required to take a programming test, don’t ask him or her what to study for it. The idea of a programming test is to see what you know and what you don’t know, not what you can cram into your head for a short period of time.
Weighty interview. The interview is going to be harsh. While you might have made it through an initial screening, you still may not be up to the company’s standards. Whoever is interviewing you will grill you to try and squeeze every last drop of information out of your mind.
Needless to say, you’d better have a lot of knowledge. Recent college graduates are not expected to be experts on every aspect of game development (though the questions they ask might make it seem otherwise), but you still need to know a good deal. If you’re asked questions that you don’t know the answers to, try to answer them logically and calmly anyway. Part of what interviewers look for is how you work through a question that’s probably above your head.
If you’re asked a question and respond, “I don’t know,” it’s a huge strike against you. If you’re the type of person who immediately gives up when presented with a problem or challenge, then you aren’t an ideal employee for a job in game development.
Here’s a strategy for how to handle the above situation: Start by saying what you do know about the problem and indicate what information you’d need to solve it. Interviewers want to see your thought process. They might even offer you hints to help you solve the problem if you’re headed in the right direction.
If, in an interview, you’re presented with a math or physics problem, never say, “I’d just look the formula up in a book.” If looking things up in a book is all you’re good for, then the company can just purchase the book for a lot cheaper than they can hire you! Try to deduce the answer instead. You should also definitely bring up relevant information that you learned in your last two years of college; so if you have trouble with your assignments from then, review them before an interview.

Your first gig
You will begin at the bottom. You have to get your start somewhere, and that place is usually at the bottom. You may work for a company that pays way below the industry standard, which is already significantly below what your friends with traditional software development jobs will make. You’ll probably have to work long hours for a small company making a sub-par game. Don’t expect to get a job working on the next title in your favorite game series just because you’re a huge fan. Your favorite game series probably got that good by hiring experienced people, and experience is something you lack coming right out of college.
Smaller companies working on lower budget games will be more willing to give you a chance—and you’ll probably have more room to grow and experiment with new techniques in that type of environment. It may not offer you the best financial rewards, but you’ll learn a lot and get experience, so you can move up.
Word of mouth. The game business is still extremely small compared to other high-tech industries. Word-of-mouth still goes a long way here, so your boss at a five-person studio may be a prime reference for (and personal friend of) the CEO at the next company you move to.
If you have the right experience and resume and have reasonable expectations regarding your interview and first job, you can definitely get your foot in the door of the game development industry. If you read this and are reluctant to work your butt off for low pay, then you should consider a field other than video games.
If you find math and physics confusing or you aren’t a hardcore coder, then game programming probably isn’t for you. If you still want to be involved in the game industry, there are many other positions for which a technical background also helps. Programmers make for great game testers because they understand the game’s implementation, so they will be better at guessing what will break. Producers who have a good understanding of programming can have more reasonable expectations from the programming team. And game designers with a background in programming won’t be intimidated by the task of scripting.
If you read this article and are still enthusiastic about doing what it takes, then there’s a position in the industry waiting for you. Now all you have to do is find it.

Virtual Virtual Boy0
Matt posted in Wii on October 3rd, 2006

The year was 1995. I was 13 and hooked on Nintendo. I was the proud owner of an NES, SNES and a GameBoy. I thought Nintendo couldn’t lose and was very excited about the promise of their new system, Virtual Boy. It came out for a whopping $180, which was expensive compared to the other Boy Nintendo had (which started at $109). My mom had the foresight that it would drop in price, so she didn’t buy it for me then. (She also had the foresight to not buy me the Power Glove. She said we could wait until it was $30, but when it was $30, I no longer wanted it. I guess the marketing effect of The Wizard had wore off. Interestingly, if my mom, a non gamer, [I’ve tried to get her interested in games with no success] can figure out that a product is going to flop, it’s amazing that people at the company that made it can’t) When it went down to $70, she finally thought the price was low enough, so I became the proud owner of Nintendo’s latest and greatest (although, it went down to $30 when they were trying to get rid of them, so maybe she should have waited longer). I picked up a bunch of games for about $4 a pop from Blockbuster (they did rent them for a bit, but by this point, they had given up). Many people complained about the monochrome graphics, but red happens to be my favorite color, so I didn’t mind. I thought the games were pretty cool too. From Red Alarm, which actually featured 3D rendered wireframe graphics (most games were sprite based), to the games that would have had a better home on another console like Panic Bomber (which was a Bomberman themed puzzle game similar to Yoshi), I thought 3D could make any game better. I read all the health information and took it seriously. I tried to set the IPD (inter pupil distance) correctly, although I was never able to set it up so all four corner icons were perfectly clear. I took breaks when the game recommended it in order to prevent eye strain.

Despite my care for the safety warnings, the day after a gaming session, I would have terrible headaches. It wasn’t too hard for my parents and I to figure out that the Virtual Boy was the cause of them. My parents had to pry the Virtual Boy from my eager hands, since after receiving a taste of gaming in true 3D, I didn’t want to be constrained in 2 dimensions again. Despite my parents returning my original Virtual Boy, I ended up buying another Virtual Boy off a friend a few years ago. The only problem is that I am afraid to use it because I may suffer though the terrible headaches.

Now, with the Virtual Console for Wii, all the Nintendo consoles will be replayable for those who missed them, save one, the Virtual Boy. Now, many of you may say that they can’t do the Virtual Boy without the special headset. If the Virtual Boy were full color, that may be a problem, but because it’s monochromatic, it perfectly lends itself to red and blue 3D. If you recall, Square pioneered this on the NES with Rad Racer and 3D World Runner. I don’t know if you had any better luck with the 3D modes in those games (press the select button to toggle the amazing 3D effects), but they certainly didn’t look 3D to me. Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves feature 3D with red and blue outlines, but to be honest, it really hurt my eyes. I promised myself before I started the game that I would play it through all the 3D segments with 3D enabled (only a few levels allowed you to turn on the 3D mode thankfully), but by the end of the game, I was dreading the 3D segments. I’m not trying to discourage you from playing Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves. It’s a great game, and I really enjoyed it, but I would definitely recommend against the 3D segments. It’s a great novelty, but not worth enduring the eye aches.

There has been plenty of successful monochromatic red and blue 3D things like Spy Kids 3D for example. I remember a very long time ago, ABC had TGIF (Thank Goodness It’s Friday - their family friendly Friday prime time line up that included better forgotten shows like Family Matters and Step by Step) in 3D. What could be better than a 3 dimensional Urkel? Possibly only Jaleel White voicing Sonic! I think the problem with Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves was that they did full color characters with 3D outlines, so it managed to confuse your eyes. If you’re interested in what playing Virtual Boy with red and blue 3D is like, people have already written emulators. Here’s a screenshot:

So, Nintendo, I know you think of Virtual Boy as your red headed step child, but there are plenty of fans like myself out there who would love to play it in a more eye friendly manner! I promise I will buy every single Virtual Boy game you release on your Virtual Console even if I already have the cartridge! I’m not going to buy any of your other rereleases because I have all of the old systems and hundreds of cartridges, so you can’t offer me anything worth buying besides Virtual Boy. Please? Do I have to start a petition? Although, according to Telltale Games, those don’t work, and they had much better luck with fans just contacting Nintendo. So, everyone start e-mailing Nintendo begging for Virtual Virtual Boy!