The Nintendo Virtual Boy did not have enough commercially released games to support a normal top-100 list. Syd Lexia did one anyway. That is the whole joke, except the site commits to it with the kind of completely unnecessary effort that made the older enthusiast web so much fun.
https://www.sydlexia.com/top100vb.htm
Published around April Fools’ Day 2010, the feature presents itself with the self-important machinery of a serious gaming ranking: an introduction, voting rules, contributors, commentary colors, rankings, and a dramatic countdown from 100 to number one.
The problem is that the Virtual Boy’s real software library was tiny.
Nintendo’s red-and-black tabletop system lasted only briefly in the mid-1990s, and North America saw only a small fraction of the number of games required for a hundred-entry ranking. Contemporary forum reactions immediately understood the absurdity. Some readers initially asked how a top 100 was possible for a machine with roughly a couple dozen releases. Others pointed out that this was precisely the joke.
Syd Lexia stretches that joke until it becomes structure.
Rather than merely posting “the Virtual Boy didn’t have 100 games,” the page mimics the familiar format of earnest gaming journalism. It creates the appearance of methodology, debate, expert voting, ranking anxiety, and editorial seriousness around a list with an impossible premise. The joke works because the presentation refuses to break character.
The site’s own introduction says the rules were modeled after earlier NES and SNES lists, with voters supposedly ranking one hundred games and only North American commercial releases being eligible. That requirement makes the impossible arithmetic even funnier. You can practically hear the spreadsheet screaming.
The page also became a small Internet reference point of its own. Gaming forums linked it, argued about it, repeated the joke, and used it as an example of a good parody list years later. That afterlife is part of the artifact: a one-off joke page survived because links and forum conversations kept pointing back to the original instead of replacing it with screenshots.
There is a broader lesson here about old gaming sites. They were often built by people with enough technical ability to publish and absolutely no editorial department telling them that spending this much time on a Virtual Boy gag had poor return on investment.
https://www.sydlexia.com/top100vb.htm
That is exactly the return. Sixteen years later, the page is still online, still understandable, and still funnier than the phrase “Top 100 Virtual Boy Games” has any right to be.