This team has restored an unreleased Nintendo Famicom game from 21 floppy disks 30 years ago in 3D

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The secret has been kept secret for 30 years, and even the developer of the game has been dead for 8 years.

I'm afraid no one would have thought that a Nintendo Famicom (NES) would be restored to the light of day again thanks to the efforts of a group of game enthusiasts, and the source code was cracked.

The game is Days of Thunder, based on the Tom Cruise movie of the same name, which can be seen as a racing version of Top Gun.

The game itself is of good quality, and with Tom Cruise's fame as a guarantee, Days of Thunder should have been released, but why was it sealed in the basement for decades? How was it restored?

With the death of the game's developer Chris Oberth eight years ago, we may never know the answer to the first question.

Some people speculated that the game distributor might not have been able to obtain the film authorization in the end, so it was not released as planned.

The award ceremony scene in the game also proves this possibility, because the winner really doesn't look like Tom Cruise at all.

So what is the quality of this game? Let's take a look at it with the trial video.

3D racing games from 30 years ago

Although the red and white game console from 30 years ago is full of 8-bit pixel style, we can see from the opening animation that each racing car is beautifully drawn and the various advertising sponsor icons on the racing cars are clearly visible.

It's hard to imagine that this is a game that only weighs 128KB .

When you open the game, you will find that there are a total of 14 different tracks. After choosing to enter the first level "Daytona" track, the game will show the length and shape of the track.

After entering the game, there are 3 racing cars to choose from. They look exactly the same, with only slight differences in engine size and controllability.

After the selection, today's qualifying game, the screen is actually 3D . Emmm... the turn is a bit fierce.

The result was not ideal, with a time of 46.25 seconds and a ranking of 10th, making him the last to start. Note that the car dashboard here is only for decoration and does not display any information.

Entering the race, the game becomes 2D , and the original dashboard can also display information such as speed, ranking, and vehicle damage. It turns out that the dashboard is only useful here.

If you turn the steering wheel too hard, the car may spin out of control.

In addition, the car driven by the driver can also enter the pit to change tires. During the tire changing process, there is a wrench rotating, and the time spent on changing tires is displayed above . The details are really well done.

Finally, if you win first place , you will see reporters taking pictures in the audience.

21 floppy disks to restore the game completely

Why did this 30-year-old game only come to light today? The story began three years ago.

In early 2017, a group of game enthusiasts and developers founded the Video Games History Foundation (VGHF), a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving, restoring and disseminating video games.

In early 2020, Oberth's family asked a friend to contact VGHF. They donated a bunch of hardware in the basement where Oberth worked to VGHF, hoping that VGHF could help restore some of the information Oberth left behind.

The hardware includes a bunch of old computers, CD-R backup discs, floppy disks, cassettes, EPROMs, etc., and even some backups can be traced back to the Apple II computer in the 1970s.

I'm afraid that today's children have never seen or even heard of these things. Floppy disks are the earliest removable thin soft media for computers, used to store things. The most commonly used is the 3.5-inch floppy disk with a capacity of 1.44M.

Among the pile of things, one item quickly caught the attention of VGHF member Rich Whitehouse.

One of the floppy disks had "NINTENDO HOT ROD TAXI FINAL" written on it. Judging from the name, this was a game developed for the Nintendo console, but I had never heard of the game name before.

Oberth had developed several games for Nintendo during his lifetime, and Whitehouse followed this clue to search for Oberth's past interview materials.

He discovered that in 2006, Oberth mentioned the never-released Famicom game "Days of Thunder" in an interview with a retro game enthusiast website. Could Hot Rod Taxi be this game?

The problem is that the game was stored on dozens of encrypted 5.25-inch floppy disks, and it's hard to find a computer that can run the 1989 MS-DOS system.

Whitehouse had to use DOSBox, a DOS system emulator, to read the floppy disk and tried to run the PC Tools backup program through DOSBox to recover the contents, but unfortunately failed.

If you want to use a simulator to restore encrypted content, the amount of work required is enormous.

The best way is to find a computer with the same configuration as it was back then, but it is really difficult to find a computer with the same configuration as in 1989. Fortunately, Whitehouse found his "all-round buddy" Foone.

Relying on the borrowed computer, Whitehouse spent two weeks restoring part of the game content. Although it is not complete, it can be played in the simulator.

He later recalled that if the files could not be successfully recovered from "a set of seemingly unrelated data", the game would be lost forever.

Now, VGHF has released the data of this game on GitHub. Users only need to run the BAT program in the MS-DOS command to package the game into an NES format file, and then import the file with NES to try it out.

Of course, if you want to support this game, you can also buy it online. VGHF said that all the proceeds from the sale of the game will be donated to Oberth's widow.

Days of Thunder is just one of the many games restored by VGHF. The next goal of this non-profit organization is to propose a digital library to release those almost forgotten video games for everyone to try out and reminisce.

We would like to thank these hardcore players who have worked hard to restore the game.

Finding and repairing console games is much more difficult than PC games, because many console games require the original consoles and special game cards to run properly. These obsolete consoles have become collectibles and are sold at high prices online.

Recently, the well-known up-host "Ao Changzhang" on Bilibili spent 20,000 yuan to buy a console in order to bring several games from the 1980s to light.

If you want to run these games on your computer, the game console emulator may also receive infringement warnings from the manufacturer.

It is because of these unremitting efforts of players that we can see those forgotten games again. In their view, games should be preserved forever as the intellectual heritage of mankind, just like books, for future generations to remember.

Respect~

Reference links:
https://www.polygon.com/2020/6/1/21276759/video-game-preservation-days-of-thunder-chris-oberth-nes
https://gamehistory.org/days-of-thunder-nes-unreleased/
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/06/30-years-later-a-lost-days-of-thunder-nes-game-recovered-from-21-floppy-disks/

GitHub address:

https://github.com/DickBlackshack/Days-of-Thunder-NES-Unpublished/