When developer Chris Oberth passed away in 2012 at the tragically young age of 59, he left behind a considerable legacy, with titles such as Phasor Zap, Anteater, Ardy the Aardvark and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom listed amongst his credits.
He also left behind a massive selection of floppy discs, hard drives and CD-Rs, all of which were donated by his family to the Video Game History Foundation, which has been sifting through the data in order to properly catalogue and preserve it. The hard work has paid off because the VGHF has discovered a NES game coded by Oberth that was assumed lost 30 years ago.
That game is Days of Thunder, a racing title based on the 1990 movie directed by Tony Scott and starring Tom Cruise. It was intended to be published by Mindscape, but the company instead released a different version of the game on the NES developed by Beam Software. It appears that Oberth's version started development earlier but was cancelled; the developer himself only talked about it once, in a 2006 interview with the retro-gaming newsletter Retrogaming Times.
As you can see from the footage, it's a little different from Beam's released version, which used crude 3D graphics to replicate the stock car action of the movie:
Incredibly, the game was discovered totally by chance as the VGHF looked through Oberth's archive of discs. The source code was spread across 21 5.25-inch floppy disks – all of which were still readable – on which archivist Rich Whitehouse found the source code, game data and assembler. From this, he was able to compile a working ROM.
Had this discovery not been made, Oberth's work would have been lost forever – but now it will live on. The VGHF is planning to make the source code available online for those who are interested in creating their own ROM from the data, and there are plans to publish the game on a working NES cart, with the proceeds going to Oberth's family.
[source arstechnica.com]
Comments 38
Tom Cruise was not up and coming in 1990. Rainman, Top Gun, Risky Business...he was a star by 1990.
That's really cool! The game looks really awesome! It would be cool.if Nintendo makes this available via the online Subscription!
Nice that someone discovered this version. That Pit sequence alone is the stuff of Wii games (surprised no one made a driving game which actively encouraged Pit crew in some way on Wii).
Impressive that none of the 21 floppy discs had degraded, now "that" is how you look after your stuff.
I hope paramount doesn’t try to sue when they release the physical product. I would like to get my hands on one of those tbh
@Lordplops Yeah I thought that was weird too. He was huge already by then. *****, he was huge when Legend came out.
"5.25-inch floppy disks"
Wow, actual floppy floppy discs. It's funny I don't think I ever owned 1 of those. My high school used punch cards but my college moved away from them the year I got there. My first home computer back then ran on cassette tapes and my 2nd a decade later used the 3 1/2" hard case floppy discs. Of which I once installed Windows 95 on about 28 of them.
Congrats to the people who had a working 5 1/2" floppy drive, and to the guy who managed to store 5 1/2 floppy discs for 30 years and still have them readable, they literally outlived him, that's no small feat.
@rjejr I honestly would have thought they would have been unreadable by now, especially considering they aren’t the hard case ones. Dust and grime takes its toll and if you put a magnet anywhere near them then everything’s lost!
@nessisonett And if you sneeze on them they bend in half and crease, rendering them unreadable. I don't own any, never had a reader at home, but I've used them enough to have bad memories.
Funny seeing your name under Nintendo Life in my inbox, I just replied to you over at PS. Guess you haven't read that yet.
I does not make me any younger but I remember the pc version was one of my first games ever. It was part of a hits compilation which featured Back to the Future 2, TMHT, Days of Thunder, Gremlins 2 all on 5 1/2 floppy disks. Those were the days...
@Lordplops
You forgot to mention Cocktail and The Color of Money as well!
Tom Cruise was already a box office superstar in 1990.
@Lordplops @Ninjatiptoes @KillerBOB Fair enough, I've edited the text. He wasn't at the height of his box office powers at that point - that's the point I was trying to make.
@rjejr Hahaha, just saw that as well. So confusing!
Looks kinda good actually.
Man. Loved this game on my old Tandy.
Had the disks been burned it would have been lost forever.
An amazing story, and the game certainly looks quite good considering graphically it's a Nes title.... The fact all 21 floppy dics worked seems unbelievable, bravo for the work involved to put this game/rom back together!!
@rjejr I remember using all those storage mediums growing up. When I watch Stranger Things and Ready Player One, my friends and I think that it’s hard to believe we were once those kids in the former and how odd it is to be the “old guys” as portrayed in the latter...or even called “old” by younger gamers addressing us as those of us in the late 30s-early 40s range.
How was this movie 30 years ago?!?! It feels like maybe 7. And the cars and world around them depicted still register as the current world to me. I don't even recognize the new stuff...this stuff is current to me!
@Damo I think past Top Gun, he was at the height. The height may have grown after....there's that whole part of the career between "Top Gun" and "Scientology has-been" that was meteoric. Burned up as fast, too....
I could make a joke about what does or doesn't make Tom floppy but I won't
@Severian I have never seen Stranger Things nor Ready Player 1 but yeah, I know what you mean. I'll be 55 next month, still gaming. "War Games" is also a good 1 to rewatch, nothing like those green phosphor screens controlling our nuclear weapons. 😂
Crazy about the disks. CDs and DVDs decay and degrade, solid state memory has limited cycles, yet old school magnetic data seems unkillable.
@rjejr Never worked with government contractors, huh? It seems extremely likely green phosphor screens still control the nukes.....
The Days of Thunder game that was released on the Amiga was really not great (I don't think any game about turning left only is going to end up great) - but what was of note is that Wikipedia says it was developed by none other than Argonaut
The released game was one of my favorite racing games on NES. I use to rent it a lot from the local store
How rad is that?! Give us the physical release!!!
@NEStalgia One guy, sitting in a room by himself, drinking his Tang...
Amazing! I love discoveries like these! Things like this is what keeps part of my gaming passion going so strong.
The game looks like crap, I can see why it wasn't released, Rad Racer on nes was better
@rjejr nono, no point of there's not an entire agency. It's all about growing the department and justifying it's existence and growing budget. 300 people. SCAM.... Sectional Contingency Administration and Maintenance. With a modest 800M annual budget.
That is amazing. I've increasingly felt that we are in the state of "everything is preserved" society, and it's either found or lost forever, which is the case with many digital suff. It's not like it can be buried for 500 years to be found later, Indiana Jones style. It would just be lost. Yet the finds like these keep on coming. Amazing.
The game was amazing! I used to play it on my dad’s Commodore 64. I still have the disks!
It looks terrible compared to the Beam version. I rented that and played through it. The driving model was sound (from behind the car) and you had to rely on well time slip-streaming and monitoring tyre wear to win, and I loved the interactive pit stops. You controlled each pit crew member. It was well done for a game that, let's face it, is just racing round and round in circles.
@NEStalgia 299 of those 300 employees are no-show jobs who got hired through nepotism, only 1 guy actually shows up. 😎
This is really kool, the VGHF do some really god stuff.
@Severian Ok, Boomer. (jkjkjkjkjk)
@noswitchbutidc I'm Gen-X dude, lol. It should be "okay karen" or something like that lol
@Severian Karen is a boomer name.
@noswitchbutidc guess again: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-7690959/Gen-Z-calling-Gen-X-Karen-Generation.html
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