I am really stunned this has appeared on a random Tuesday.
Zero Racers looks good, like another Red Alarm but faster with less to draw – but Dragon Hopper (or should I say D-Hopper which side note is a really stupid name choice given the slang meaning) looks amazing. I am really looking forward to playing that as much as I was Bound High! Just seeing the short snippet above what scans we previously had is very exciting in itself. It looks a ton of fun.
Fingers crossed we can get actual carts of these, and not just load them up on the flashcarts.
I am also absolutely speechless. Randomly Nintendo droped that Dragonhopper, the holy VirtualBoy Grail, will be released and also Zero Racers.. I think its a good Day 😀 cant wait to get it. Hopefully someone can dump it later and also release it on a Cartridge on Etsy or so 😅
Somebody tech-savy enough will extract the ROMs from NSO so that Zero Racers and Dragon Hopper can be played in real-hardware and emulation.
This pretty much shot up the possibilities of seeing any other unreleased VB games that might be completed, with Bound High! being the most obvious one. Virtual Bomberman, Niko-Chan Battle, Virtual League Baseball 2, Virtual Block, and Virtual Tank could have a chance too!
I really hope Nintendo give us the option to play VB games without the accesories.
Update [Wed 28th Jan 2026, 10am]: For those of you wondering about the name change for D-Hopper, it appears that the “Dragon Hopper” trademark was claimed by the Malta-based Push Gaming Product Limited in March 2024.
As highlighted by the excellent Cheesemeister on Bluesky, the mark was granted to the gambling outfit in February last year and covers “Recorded computer game software for gaming machines, namely, slot machines and video lottery terminals”. So, Nintendo apparently snoozed and loozed lost this one.
This is great and I hope it somehow leads to the roms coming out to us as well.
But at the same time it saddens me that Nintendo did the “accessory required” thing, because it’s going to make the whole thing a failure most likely. So it’s really a bittersweet moment in time.
This is the absolute best news. I *never* expected that they’d release these. What a great day!
I know that the ROM for Bound High is available and was released by the community, and that was done with community resources. Did the source code need much work before it was released? If so, then maybe the game wasn’t finished enough for Nintendo to release it on this, sort of a similar situation to Faceball.
I’m just happy they’re putting these two games out there! I have my VB shell preordered. I do hope that it’s easy enough to extract the ROMs so that I can fire up my FlashBoy.
Since the games are emulated in the Switch it is highly likely that the ROMs are easily useable on real VBs.
And the ROMs will be released since the whole thing is also for Switch 1, which is hackable.
This reply was modified 2 days, 16 hours ago by abarth.
Such a crazy day. Been chasing this dream for 30 years. It’s unbelievable that Nintendo seriously has been sitting on these games for 30 years!!! Never once showed them to any press….never once showed video or screenshots…..never once even put them in a Nintendo museum or Nintendo store in New York or anything!! How they could they imprison these games for so long. Were they in a vault with 1000 locks on it or something???
Hackers community, please harvest these roms somehow! When they launch on switch 2, we gotta get them off the console somehow.
I hope we don’t have to wait this long but it would be wild if these dropped on August 26th, 30 years to the day of their originally scheduled release.
