Snatcher is one of the coolest video games ever made. It also, obviously, never made it to Nintendo’s doomed Virtual Boy, so you’ve got a couple of fans to thank for this unexpected demo of the adventure classic running on the VR system.
https://lastchance.cc/snatcher-hideo-kojimas-adventure-masterpiece-5837305%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E
One of those fans, as outlined in this planetvb forum post (via Tiny Cartridge), is thunderstruck, who actually put this demo together. It’s a hell of a feat, taking between 200-300 hours, as he had to take every screen and convert it to stereoscopic 3D, along with adding stuff like PCM music and sound effects.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbE8Zg908u4
The other fan, however, is a sadder tale. thunderstruck was inspired to create this demo after learning that another planetvb user who had begun work on something similar passed away last year. As thunderstruck writes:
During the last coding competition a new member going by the nickname Red Metal joined planetvb. He planned to submit a VB port of Snatcher, a game that I had never heard of. After 7 post he stopped writing updates. Almost exactly one year ago someone else posted that Red Metal had passed away.
That post choked me up quite a bit. I had never talked to him but from his post I could tell that he was a very nice person. I felt like I missed my chance to get to know him. I tried to express that in a post but somehow my words felt meaningless to me.
It sparked an idea though… I could create a Snatcher port in his memory. So I started learning about the game and all the different versions. After playing it for a bit I came to the conclusion that it’s too complex. But somehow I couldn’t let the idea go.
You can download the demo here
