Sometimes people invent themselves a history, sometimes they invent the history of a video game.
A web developer claimed that he bought an unreleased Japanese Nintendo game called “Doki Doki Toshokan: Gatsby no Monogatari” at a yard sale for fifty cents and put an English version of The Great Gatsby 8-bit NES-style game online.
This isn’t the first time that The Great Gatsby has been reinvented for the computer. A find-the-hidden-object game based on the classic novel came out last summer but was not met with very favorable reviews.
But the game’s nostalgic backstory helped propel it to success, with over 4,000 re-tweets and facebook likes in the past few days.
In reality, the game was no yard-sale treasure. It was created by Charles Hoey, a developer at San Francisco-based Barabarian Group, and Pete Smith, an editor at Nerve.com, out of whole cloth, something Fitzgerald would surely appreciate.
In addition to putting the game online, the developers made the open source coding available so that other developers can take literary favorites and make them into NES-style video games. A forgotten Sega Gensis version of Tell Tale Heart discovered beneath the floorboards perhaps?
