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Gatsby NES: Greatest. Found Item. EVER.

I’m kind of speechless here, being a oft-unabashedly bookish nerd and also slavishly nostalgic about my 8-bit gaming past. As such, this story is a little bit like a fairy tale. One that involves little Nick Carraway firing at flappers and butlers with his hat…

Yes, there is an open-source Great Gatsby NES game you can play online. No, you have not had one too many martinis this morning, Old Sport.


Here’s the background from the game’s highly minimal website:

If anybody has more info about this please let me know! As it is, I really don’t know much about this game. I found it at a yard sale. I bought it for 50 cents and went home to try it out. After dusting off my NES for like, 20 minutes I got it working, and jesus. So weird. Apparently it’s an unreleased localization of a Japanese cart called “Doki Doki Toshokan: Gatsby no Monogatari”, but I haven’t found anything about that either.

As I’ve provided the link, if you have any further info to share with these guys about the origin of this game, you are highly encouraged to do so.  The rest of you, please join me in the garden for what is sure to be hours of time-wasting in the very, very near future. (Seriously, if there is an 8-bit rendering of Daisy running over Myrtle with the car, I’ll get up and do the Charleston myself…)

Keys:
Jump: Space bar
Shoot: Z (in full-screen mode, Tab)
Move: Arrow keys
Full screen mode: F

Image: GreatGatsbyGame.com

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Comments

  1. Kevin C. says:

    Well that was ton more fun than reading that book.

    I wish I could get an .mp3 of that title track….sooo good.

  2. Corey K. says:

    Yes, you have to shoot the glasses with the hat. (“Shoot”? Well, whatever.) It takes five hits to defeat Eckleburg, whereas you die if he gets you three times. I was stuck there are a long time, then defeated him via sheer luck and was able to easily play through to the end after that. When you finish the game, be sure to sit through the entire closing credits. 🙂

  3. babe says:

    Books id like to see made into NES games:
    The Scarlet Letter
    Catcher in the Rye
    Miss Lonelyhearts
    The Glass Menagerie
    The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
    White Noise <- this would be a really wierd NES game

  4. Kiki says:

    Jae is right. I don’t understand what you’re supposed to do in the TJ Eckleburg level. if you stand right over the 3rd and 4th door things on the car you can dodge the rays. but i don’t understand why i still lose when the time winds down to 0. are you supposed to try to shoot him with the hat? i’m confused.

  5. Jae says:

    T.J. Eckeburg is hekkuh hard to beat. Any tips guys?

  6. Josh says:

    uh… It was made recently and not “found” at all.
    http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/02/15/the-roaring-80s-the-great-gatsby-nes
    Retro remakes are fairly popular and if licencing movies to make crap games was so successful they started licensing literature for games… that’s an alternate reality I don’t want to think about.

  7. Bainmarny says:

    Do they make a Cliff’s Notes version of the game too? I don’t want to play the whole thing

  8. Louis says:

    If all of my reading assignments were NES games, college would be a breeze!

  9. CaptainxBumout says:

    This game was actually pretty easy. I beat it without losing all my lives