Hi guys,

I’m new on the Virtual Boy scene and I have a question: there’s some games that have never been released (Bound High or Space Pinball), but is there any Mario Land Virtual Boy rom somewhere ? I have no idea of far the game was (in development), so maybe it’s impossible that the game will be leaked one day.

But what do you think? Is there any chance we’re getting it someday?

Nobody has ever come forward, saying that they have a true Mario Land VB ROM. It doesn’t seem that it was very far along in development, so the videos on this site showing the first stage of the game might be all that there is to see of it.

Someone in the homebrew scene made a nice playable demo of a Mario Land game, which looks a lot like the first official level of the unreleased Mario Land VB game. Check it out sometime if you haven’t already:

http://www.planetvb.com/modules/games/?h042d

Unfortunately, I don’t think the programmer will ever finish this homebrew title.

He wasn’t really programming a mario game..he was working on a coding engine to help people code. The engines goal was to create a lot of the sprite and scrolling aspects of the code..and let the programmer work on other aspects (memory ??). It was his school project. I think the mario level was created to demonstrate his engine (the vbjaengine)

More info here:
http://www.planetvb.com/modules/games/?h034g

I’m a Virtual Boy noob, but as far as I know, the game was not very far into development at all. Instead, they (Nintendo) decided to take a shortcut and flesh out the mini-game of Mario Land VB, Mario Clash, into a full-fledged arcade-style game that we know of today. Shortly after, the Virtual Boy’s rapid decline was beginning and it wasn’t a worthwhile venture to complete.

I could be getting my timetable wrong, but I believe that’s generally what occurred.

Judging from your question, I’m not certain if you’re aware of how many unreleased games are leaked. What generally happens is that a prototype of an unreleased game falls into the hands of a collector/retro-gamer, who then dumps (or has someone else more knowledgeable dump) the ROM. After that, the owner usually either distributes it freely, asks for donations first, or first releases it as a reproduction and THEN shares the ROM freely after some time has passed. All that being said, typically a ROM of an unreleased game is only released when the prototype is found. If there is no prototype for the game, chances are, there’s no ROM for it either and if somehow there is, it may be on an EPROM chip (as opposed to a full cart) locked away in Nintendo’s secret vaults of secrecy. Given that VB Mario Land’s development may not have gotten very far, there may be no ROM at all anymore, and if there is, it’s just the first few levels (which would still be very cool). Sad but true.

My bet is that there’s no prototype cartridge of the game and most likely isn’t a trace of the ROM left. If there is, it’s in Nintendo’s HQ somewhere and kept for historical purposes. That’s just wishful thinking, though.

Oki..we are all talking about different things..I gotta go..but I feel like i must straiten this up a bit.

Yes there was a mario game planned..it was never finished but it was demoed at WECS 1995. You can see some video of it here:

http://www.planetvb.com/modules/games/?u020m

It had a side scrolling level..with 2 level backgrounds (like wario land). Also, it seems to have dungeon aspects like zelda.

The rom has never been found or released..the game was never close to being completed. There was a mini level of mario brothers installed in the game..later on that level was expanded and given it’s own game..mario clash.

Now..I think Krisse and Dogp was planning on coding a mario game..but it never got off the ground.

There was another homebrew mario level created by Jorgeche…it was created to show how to use his new sprite/scrolling engine (vbJAEngine (?)).

His mario level is here:

http://www.planetvb.com/modules/games/?h042g

Mario is a bit slow..but it’s a pretty cool level idea. Pretty fun and I wish it was longer. Also, I think it it was in homage to the original mario vb level (that later became mario clash)

Jorgeche’s sprite/scrolling engine is here:
http://www.planetvb.com/modules/games/?h034g

-Eric..hopefully didn’t confuse you more

bigmak wrote:
I think the mario level was created to demonstrate his engine (the vbjaengine)

How sure are you about that? The status of the game on the homebrew list is “On Hold.” This makes it seem that he wanted to make more levels at a later time and that the demo isn’t all that he intended to make.

Yea i’m pretty sure I remember him saying that…I’ll try to find the posting where he talks about it.

-Eric

To be clear, the potential “first few levels” I referred to in my previous post was speculative based off the confirmed footage of VB Mario Land, not the homebrew. That’d be neat if the homebrew was completed as a full game, regardless if it is a project on hold or simply an engine.

OK, there’s some misinformation here, partly caused by my own article on this site, which has been written a long time ago. A lot of additional light has been shed on the subject since then, though, so I think we have to rethink.

A demo called “Mario Bros. VB” was playable at Shoshinkai in 1994, when the Virtual Boy was shown to the public for the very fist time. It was a almost direct 2D port of the classic Mario Bros. game and certainly inspired the creation of Mario Clash, therefore I’d classify it as a prototype of Mario Clash.

Then there was a self-running one-level Mario sidescroller shown in video form at E3 and WCES 1995. This one level obviously was a demo to showcase what the VB can pull off, hence the short level with a Zelda-inspired top-down viewed room and the weird chronology with Mario cracking through the floor before coming out of a pipe in the background. I think this game should be classified as a technical demo rather than an unreleased game as it was only a concept and probably never playable. It seems that at least the Mario sprite was (reworked slightly and) reused for Mario Clash, though.

We managed to find extensive video footage of both demos, which you can find in the games section.

Now to speak about the two Mario homebrew efforts, in both of which I was involved.

The first one was started by DogP, who did the programming, and me, I did the graphics, like ten years ago. There was only a tiny demo before the game got cancelled.

Then there was jorgeche’s Mario game, which got a bit farther. It all started in 2006, when jorge released the first demos of his “VB Game Development Kit”, which was going to be his master thesis. These demos came in form of a side-scrolling Mario game with sprites from Super Mario RPG, in which you could freely move not only left and right, but also into and out of the screen. There was also Goombas and boxes, but those were really hard to hit because you had tobe at the exactly right spot on the z-axis. I talked to jorge a lot about his engine back then and I proposed to use the sprites I originally did for the other Mario project, lock the game to two or three layers on the z-axis and connect these via bridges. Hence… recreating the look and feel of the Mario demo that was shown by Nintendo. We did that and eventually, the engine was released as “VBJAEngine” and the Mario demo participated in the PVB Coding Competition. Jorge and I thought about developing the demo further into a full game, but then Jorge started his job in the gaming industry and, sadly, did not have much time for the VB any more. I tried to take over and enhanced the demo a little bit, added Goombas and experimented with other stuff. I noticed some bugs while doing that, like with background position calculation. This was not an easy thing to fix, though, and the rewrite of the respective parts of the engine were never finished.

^ Thank you for that clarification!

Yes, thank you KR155E, I really thought Mario Land VB was a real game and was canceled, rather than a demo.
It’s a shame there is not a true Mario plateformer on the Virtual Boy… This is the only Nintendo device without at least one Mario plateformer so far.

If someone complete a VB Mario’s homebrew someday, I will play it! 🙂

Thanks for the detailed information, Krisse. I figured that you must have had a lot more information than what has been revealed on the forum threads previously.

Does this mean that for as long as the status of the Mario game says “On Hold” on the homebrew list, we can hold onto the hope that the game could be finalized someday, or does it seem that the game should now be labeled as “canceled”?