A San Fransisco man, in a stroke of genius, has adapted F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel The Great Gatsby to an NES-style 8-bit platformer.
It’s often been said that there is a fine line between genius and lunacy, and I am fairly certain there is no better example of this than the 8-bit Great Gatsby, which has been making the internet rounds. The game’s website claims that it is an unreleased localization of a Japanese Nintendo game for the NES called Doki Doki Toshokan: Gatsby no Monogatari that the website’s creator, Charlie Hoey, purchased for 50 cents at a garage sale. To back this up, he provided a copy of a Nintendo Power advertisement from 1990 and a scanned page from the game’s instruction manual.
In reality, Hoey created the game on a whim after creating an 8-bit tribute to the classic novel’s cover. They simply couldn’t stop, and eventually ended up with 4 levels of Gatsby-themed glory. The game includes several characters, places, and lines from the book, and even has a few short cut-scenes.
You play as Nick Carraway, the narrator of the novel, as you traverse New York from the Valley of Ashes to the West Egg. To fight off the baddies (flappers, hobos, gangsters… ghosts?), you simply fling Nick’s hat, Oddjob-style. Can you defeat the laser-shooting eyes of Dr. Eckleberg? Can you best the drunken tantrums of Tom Buchanan?
Play the game, and be borne back ceaselessly into the (gaming) past.
Sorry, it had to be said.
