WiiNoob

A Roaring Mystery: The Great Gatsby NES Game Uncovered

It might be the greatest literary classic to video game adaptation ever and was lost from video game history until one gamer coughed up half a dollar for it.

Say a flabbergasting hello to America author F. Scott Fitzgerald’s timeless novel, The Great Gatsby,  for the Nintendo Entertainment System. (You heard me right, I-didn’t-stutter.)

While yard sale browsing, Charlie Hoey happened to come across a NES cartridge, one without label and only a game manual strapped on by a rubber band. Curiosity peeked, and because it was only 50 cents, Charlie took the cartridge home with him, dusted off his NES, inserted it into the machine, and to his surprise and now ours, the game that started up was The Great Gatsby.

Charlie soon found out that he had in his possession an unreleased localization of a Japanese game called “Doki Doki Toshokan: Gatsby no Monogatari,” i.e. The Great Gatsby. In the game you play as the narrator of the acclaimed novel, Nick Carraway, as he fights off 1920’s flappers, hobos, drunks, gangsters, and the laser-shooting eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg with the boomerang-action of his classy hat.

Along with his many discoveries, Charlie even managed to find an old magazine advertisement for The Great Gatsby on NES, which he has politely shared a scanned picture of with us (as seen below,) that is particularly interesting in style and possibly the only known evidence of the game’s existence.

Truly fascinating, I should say. Now if only the above story about this game was any true.

There was no yard sale, no actual magazine ad, nor a crazy Japanese developer of yesteryear who decided that one of the most iconic books of the 20th century needed a NES game adaptation; it is just an amusing made up back-story for a flash game that you can play online for free – thought up by Charlie Hoey, Pete Smith, Dylan Valentine, and Michael DiMotta, an illustrator who provided the awesome-looking mock magazine ad.

They even went so far as making a bogus game manual, which looks honestly authentic to the eye.

Great job team, you did a fantastic job creating not only a fun little game based on Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, but also a truly whimsical mythos that incorporates fake media that is sure to fool the unsuspecting Internet junkie. If you’re interested in some other interesting mythos in other games, how about The 3rd Birthday for the PSP, or the Tomb Raider Trilogy HD for the PlayStation 3.

Via: Escapist Magazine