If you've ever played 3D WorldRunner for the NES and accidentally hit the select button, you probably thought to yourself that you glitched the game or that you broke something somehow. Don't worry, you didn't. It was an early attempt at trying to create a 3D effect by using a technique called 'Anglyph 3D'. I won't go into all the details here, but it basically involves using two colors, and glasses with specially-colored lenses to give each of your eyes a slightly different image, which gives the illusion of 3D.
Back In The Day (tm) I never really had a chance to try out the 3D features of this game because I almost never had the 3D glasses, and they weren't something that were available anywhere where I could go to shop. I did get a used copy once that had the 3D glasses in them, which I promptly lost, and then found again with the sole of my shoes, so I didn't get to use those, either.
But Amazon is a thing now, and thanks to the power of 'actually having a job that pays me money sometimes', I decided to buy a pair of real 3D glasses and try again to make the 3D effect in this game work.
Once I had them in hand, I dug out my copy of 3D WorldRunner, turned on my NES, and pressed 'select'. The result is the video you see below.
You might notice that I misjudge a lot of things. This isn't (only) because I'm bad at this game, but it's because I just plain can't see what I'm doing most of the time. Turning on 3D mode makes the background black. The red and cyan color separation is also super dark, and really hard to see.
I played with the color settings on my TV to try to get the odd-colored red and the even-odder-colored cyan to match the lenses in the glasses I bought, and I got them pretty close, but I couldn't quite get them to match, and a little bit of each color bled into the other lens, which kind of ruined the 3D effect.
I also suspected that my 3D glasses were some cheap off-brand (like there's a name-brand 3D glasses manufacturer I could name?) and maybe the lenses were way too far off of what they're supposed to be and they wouldn't work on anything.
I did a search on YouTube for 3D anaglyph videos and found lots of videos that worked surprisingly well, so it's definitely (probably) not the glasses.
It's also possible that the developers of the game had a mis-calibrated TV when they made this game. Or maybe it's one of those things that they didn't really try to get working, but it was a gimmick that they wanted to put on the box.
Either way, now I have some super-cool 3D glasses I can wear to cosplay that guy from Back to the Future. Although wearing them for too long gives me a pretty nasty headache, so I'll probably have to reserve that for special occasions.