Tech journalist makes arcade sticks for the Virtual Boy console

The Virtual Boy is perhaps the most unusual console that Nintendo has released. Although the device flopped, the Virtual Boy has gained a fan base over the years. One of those fans even designed two arcade sticks for the console.

Tech journalist Benj Edwards, who writes for The Atlantic and Ars Technica, among others, has been designing and building arcade sticks for older consoles since 2016. After a good friend and colleague of his bought several Virtual Boys, Edwards thought it would be fun to make an arcade stick for the console. He started making it partly because of the obscurity of the Virtual Boy and the fact that he hadn’t yet made an arcade stick for a “3D system,” Edwards tells Kotaku. He has made two versions of the arcade stick.

The first design is called the BX-250, whose button positions appear to match that of the Virtual Boy controller. Edwards used faulty controllers as a frame of reference for the arcade sticks. In addition, it was necessary to use the connector of the broken Virtual Boy controllers, as it is no longer widely produced. Edwards designed the PCB himself, as did the appearance of the peripherals.

Then came the BX-240. While this version of the arcade stick was designed to be used for Hyper Fighter, Street Fighter II’s Virtual Boy port, it can also be used for other games. “It has ‘shoulder buttons’ on the back, which work the same as the trigger buttons on the Virtual Boy controller. The two buttons on the front are the same as those trigger buttons, so you can use your thumb for pressing while playing Wario Land with the A and B buttons,” explains Edwards.

The designer does not intend to produce the arcade sticks on a large scale, at most on demand. He has since received a ‘handful of orders’. Edwards does not yet have a fixed target price for the BX-240 or for the BX-250.