Hello Virtual Boy fans!

Who would really wish for an “Sora Tobu Henry” prototype to be discovered some day? (I do! Would you?)

Think about it. It’s about an adorable eyes-closed dog that can fly with its long floppy ears!

Enemies come from every direction in 3D aspect including the very back layer!

Side scrolling platform style goes to shooting almost-Space Harrier-like style!

Who would love to see this game discovered?

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Yes! Me! But I highly doubt it. It is almost 29 years now since the game should have been released and I am not that confident that it will get discovered.
But yes, a “new” VB game would be brilliant! I have not experienced the golden times where Bound High and Faceball have been discovered, so I am dying for sth new 🙂

(To abarth)

I agree with you, it’s not everyday that an such rarest prototype of an unreleased game gets found for every VB fans to see (Bound High and Faceball were lucky ones to be found), especially the fact that Human Entertainment (who developed Sora Tobu Henry) was defunct at the very beginning of 2000’s. The legendary time will tell us if one of the Human Entertainment staff will… A: Show this as a video footage or an priced item. or… B: Might never happen. We’ll hopefully see the answer the legendary time will say…

We’ll wait and see, and hope for the letter “A” 😌

I was just “reading” (I don’t know Japanese) a 5chan thread about unreleased Virtual Boy games and somebody mentioned that this 2014 interview with game designer Goichi Suda (in Japanese), where they got him to play a Virtual Boy, talks a little bit about Flying Henry.

Suda worked at Human Entertainment in the mid-to-late ’90s. He wasn’t involved in Flying Henry himself but another team at the studio was working on the game. Here’s some quotes courtesy of Google Translate:

First of all, could you tell us about your memories of Virtual Boy?

Suda: A long time ago, there was talk of developing Virtual Boy software during the Human era. When the development kit came to the company, I actually touched it. It gets very exciting within the company, and everyone plays through it and is satisfied with it.

After that, there was a development team, but unfortunately it never went on sale. I think it was a game where a dog with big ears, like Dumbo, flies through the air. It was a game planned by Koike-chan from Dragon’s Earth, and I can’t remember the title. Ah, I just searched for “human + virtual boy” and it came up. The title is Flying Henry” (lol).

It’s a cute game. Mr. Suda, are you not involved in the development at all?

Suda: In terms of development, at the time Human had a planning department. There were a lot of planners there, and one of them was Koike-chan. Then, an in-house programmer was assigned to his project. Maybe even a prototype was made. We also held demos within the company. However, I think they stopped development midway because the market situation was not good.

[abarth]

Very interesting, especially this: “Maybe even a prototype was made. We also held demos within the company”.

Btw, I have just seen this page from the Human Club Dec´ 1995, I think it is quite unknown.

• This reply was modified 3 days, 11 hours ago by abarth.

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(To Vague Rant)

Wow! What a interesting information! So was it happens to be that Human Entertainment was a publisher for this game by any chance? I hope for the letter “A” the time tells that a prototype or an demo of it has to be found somewhere!

(To abarth)

Great find! There’s more screenshots of it, with a little clean filter! And we get to see a few characters besides Henry from this game too!

Yeah, to me it seems most likely that Human would have published the game themselves, at least in Japan. They had both development and publishing arms. At roughly the same time as Henry would have been released (1994-1995) they also developed and published other titles like The Firemen, Clock Tower and several Fire Pro Wrestling games on SFC/SNES. That said, they did sometimes work with external publishers, especially for releases outside Japan. Super Soccer (1991) was published by Human in Japan, but Nintendo in North America/Europe. F1 Pole Position 2 (1994) was published by Human in Japan and Ubisoft in Europe. So maybe if the game got far enough for a North American release to be planned, they would have found an outside partner. But it seems most likely that any materials that still exist today would be in Japan.

(To Vague Rant)

Quite nice information, I guess that an prototype or demo of Flying Henry might be here in Japan.

Now we only need someone with VERY good connections in Japan 😉

(To abarth)

You’re absolutely right! We definitely need these kind of people! 😁