Digital archivists working with the Video Game History Foundation have discovered a previously lost NES game based on the 1990 film Days of Thunder. The game was co-authored by Chris Oberth, a developer known for the arcade games Anteater, Time Killers, World Class Bowling, and Winter Games for the Commodore 64. Preservationist Rich Whitehouse has written about his weeks-long journey to resurrect the long-lost title, and the saga is worth a read for anyone interested in the challenges of finding and preserving old games.
Oberth died in 2012, but he left behind a trove of old computer hardware from his time as a developer. Then, earlier this year, the hardware was donated to the Video Game History Foundation in the hopes that the nonprofit organization could help to make sense of it.
They found a clue in one of Oberth’s final public interviews where he briefly mentioned working on an unpublished version of Days of Thunder for Mindscape (Beam Software was ultimately commissioned to finish work on the game and that version is the one that was released commercially).
After ripping the disk and assembling a binary using the source code and assets, they found an NES game that was technically playable. “If anything, it appeared to be early proof-of-concept work, perhaps Oberth getting his feet wet for the first time on a platform that was brand new to him,” said VGHF founder Frank Cifaldi.
After coming up short, the team had one other place to check – a stack of nearly 40 floppy disks containing a variety of hard drive backups made with various tools over the years. There’s a deep dive on this process over on the foundation’s website if that’s the sort of thing you like to geek out on.
Since these are digital archivists we’re talking about, naturally, the next stage is to publish the source code so that it’s publicly available. Whitehouse tells Polygon that they’re planning to put buildable source code on GitHub “in a week or so.” Separately, a group of retro gaming enthusiasts has plans to publish a small print run of the game on playable NES cartridges to raise money for Oberth’s wife.
