I’ve written about a lot of different video game hardware over the years, from new consoles to retro gadgets to whatever you want to call the Playdate. But I can’t remember ever being perpetually sore from testing a device; such are the joys of the Virtual Boy. Nintendo has turned its biggest flop into an accessory for the Switch, but the costs involved — to your wallet, eyes, and neck — make it a tough sell. Much like the original, this is a novelty for Nintendo sickos only.

First released in 1995, the original Virtual Boy looked like a VR headset but wasn’t actually VR or a headset. Instead, the console offered stereoscopic 3D games that you viewed through a pair of bulky goggles that were propped up on a stand. It also rendered games in eye-searing red and black, making for an experience that had some potential but was ultimately ugly and uncomfortable. It was a flop and was discontinued after just a year, amassing a library of less than two dozen games.

Now Nintendo has brought that same experience to the Switch. Virtual Boy games have been added to the Nintendo Classics collection of retro games available to Switch Online subscribers this week, but the twist is, because of the unique nature of the original hardware, you need to buy an accessory to actually play them. There’s a plastic re-creation of the Virtual Boy that’ll run you $100, which is what I’ve been using, as well as a cheaper cardboard headset that’s a much more reasonable $25. Either way, you’ll need both a subscription and an accessory to play these games.

Technically the games will run in portable mode without one of the accessories connected, but without the magnifying goggles, they’re displayed so small that they’re essentially unplayable. It looks something like this:

The plastic Virtual Boy looks like the original hardware, complete with a fake controller port and volume dial. But really it’s an elaborate Switch (or Switch 2) case that turns it into something resembling a Virtual Boy. It works like this: The top of the Virtual Boy opens up, letting you slot in a Switch, sans Joy-Con controllers, inside. When you close it up, the Switch becomes the console powering the Virtual Boy-like experience. Look through the goggles, and you’re awash in pixelated reds and blacks (though other colors will be available post-launch).

Since you don’t wear it strapped to your face, the Virtual Boy doesn’t have the same problems as a typical VR headset, where you’re supporting a bunch of weight on your head. But it’s still far from comfortable in my experience. The stand is adjustable so you can change the angle of the goggles, but I had a hard time finding an optimal viewing angle, despite trying to play it lots of different ways. And man, those red graphics; they were hard to look at in the ’90s, and things haven’t improved much. The Virtual Boy is a system where you need to take frequent breaks to save your eyes and neck. Don’t make the same mistakes I did.

All that said, the Virtual Boy’s lineup is surprisingly interesting to play in 2026. There are seven titles available at launch, and while there are a few duds — I just can’t seem to wrap my head around the first-person robot fighter Teleroboxer — I’ve really been enjoying playing 3D Tetris, Galactic Pinball, and the space shooter Red Alarm. The standout might be Wario Land, a fairly straightforward and occasionally clunky platformer but with 3D elements like enemies that jump out right in front of you, making things feel more tense. It’s not a huge lineup by any stretch, but it gives you a good sense of what the Virtual Boy is all about. Which is to say, there are some solid games with neat 3D gimmicks that are fun in short doses. (Why the tentpole Mario’s Tennis isn’t available at launch, especially given the recent release of Mario Tennis Fever, is a mystery to me.)

Nintendo tends to have a complicated relationship with its own history, often glossing over its failures and doing a poor job of celebrating what makes its games so important. So on one hand, the existence of this Virtual Boy seems like something of a miracle. Few people had a chance to play the original, and here it is available through Nintendo’s most successful platform ever. But it’s also a product that requires jumping through a lot of hoops for a small amount of payoff. And since it’s tied to NSO, you’re spending $100 to play games only for as long as you have a subscription or the service is active. After that, you have a costly paperweight.

The Switch version of the Virtual Boy is a device that’s weird, awkward, and of limited appeal — which, now that I think about it, perfectly re-creates the experience of the original.

Brian Boland spent more than a decade figuring out how to build a system that would make Meta money. On Thursday, he told a California jury it incentivized drawing more and more users, including teens, onto Facebook and Instagram — despite the risks.

Boland’s testimony came a day after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stand in a case over whether Meta and YouTube are liable for allegedly harming a young woman’s mental health. Zuckerberg framed Meta’s mission as balancing safety with free expression, not revenue. Boland’s role was to counter this by explaining how Meta makes money, and how that shaped its platforms’ design. Boland testified that Zuckerberg fostered a culture that prioritized growth and profit over users’ wellbeing from the top down. He said he’s been described as a whistleblower — a term Meta has broadly sought to limit for fear it would prejudice the jury, but which the judge has generally allowed. Over his 11 years at Meta, Boland said he went from having “deep blind faith” in the company to coming to the “firm belief that competition and power and growth were the things that Mark Zuckerberg cared about most.”

Boland last served as Meta’s VP of partnerships before leaving in 2020, working to bring content to the platform that it could monetize, and previously worked in a variety of advertising roles beginning in 2009. He testified that Facebook’s infamous early slogan of “move fast and break things” represented “a cultural ethos at the company.” He said the idea behind the motto was generally, “don’t really think about what could go wrong with a product, but just get it out there and learn and see.” At the height of its prominence internally, employees would sit down at their desks to see a piece of paper that said, “what will you break today?” Boland testified.

Zuckerberg consistently made his priorities for the company abundantly clear, according to Boland. He’d announce them in all hands meetings and leave no shadow of a doubt what the company should be focused on, whether it was building its products to be mobile-first, or getting ahead of the competition. When Zuckerberg realized that then-Facebook had to get into shape to compete with a rumored Google social network competitor (which he didn’t name, but seemed to refer to Google+), Boland recalled a digital countdown clock in the office that symbolized how much time they had left to achieve their goals during what the company called a “lockdown.” During his time at the company, Boland testified, there was never a lockdown around user safety, and Zuckerberg allegedly instilled in engineers that “the priorities were on winning growth and engagement.”

Meta has repeatedly denied that it tries to maximize users’ engagement on its platforms over safeguarding their wellbeing. In the past weeks, both Zuckerberg and Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri testified that building platforms that users enjoy and feel good on is in their long-term interest, and that’s what drives their decisions.

Boland disputes this. “My experience was that when there were opportunities to really try to understand what the products might be doing harmfully in the world, that those were not the priority,” he testified. “Those were more of a problem than an opportunity to fix.”

When safety issues came up through press reports or regulatory questions, Boland said, “the primary response was to figure out how to manage through the press cycle, to what the media was saying, as opposed to saying, ‘let’s take a step back and really deeply understand.” Though Boland said he told his advertising-focused team that they should be the ones to discover “broken parts,” rather than those outside the company, he said that philosophy didn’t extend to the rest of the company.

On the stand the day before, Zuckerberg pointed to documents around 2019 showing disagreement among his employees with his decisions, saying they demonstrated a culture that encourages a diversity of opinion. Boland, however, testified that while that might have been the case earlier in his tenure, it later became “a very closed down culture.”

Since the jury can only consider decisions and products that Meta itself made, rather than content it hosted from users, lead plaintiff attorney Mark Lanier also had Boland describe how Meta’s algorithm works, and the decisions that went into making and testing it. Algorithms have an “immense amount of power,” Boland said, and are “absolutely relentless” in pursuing their programmed goals — in many cases at Meta, that was allegedly engagement. “There’s not a moral algorithm, that’s not a thing,” Boland said. “Doesn’t eat, doesn’t sleep, doesn’t care.”

During his testimony on Wednesday, Zuckerberg commented that Boland “developed some strong political opinions” toward the end of his time at the company. (Neither Zuckerberg nor Boland offered specifics, but in a 2025 blog post, Boland indicated he was deleting his Facebook account in part over disagreements with how Meta handled events like January 6th, writing that he believed “Facebook had contributed to spreading ‘Stop the Steal’ propaganda and enabling this attempted coup.”) Lanier spent time establishing that Boland was respected by peers, showing a CNBC article about his departure that quoted a glowing statement from his then-boss, and a reference to an unnamed source who reportedly described Boland as someone with a strong moral character.

On cross examination, Meta attorney Phyllis Jones clarified that Boland didn’t work on the teams tasked with understanding youth safety at the company. Boland agreed that advertising business models are not inherently bad, and neither are algorithms. He also admitted that many of his concerns involved the content users were posting, which is not relevant to the current case.

During his direct examination, Lanier asked if Boland had ever expressed his concerns to Zuckerberg directly. Boland said he’d told the CEO he’d seen concerning data showing “harmful outcomes” of the company’s algorithms and suggested that they investigate further. He recalled Zuckerberg responding something to the effect of, “I hope there’s still things you’re proud of.” Soon after, he said, he quit.

Boland said he left upwards of $10 million worth of unvested Meta stock on the table when he departed, though he admitted he made more than that over the years. He said he still finds it “nerve-wracking” every time he speaks out about the company. “This is an incredibly powerful company,” he said.