In one of the most unreal data-recovery projects we've ever heard of, a seemingly lost NES game has been unearthed—as archived on a single hard drive backup, spread across 21 5.25-inch floppy disks.

A joint effort led in part by the Video Game History Foundation began earlier this year with a pile of leftover CD-Rs, floppies, computers, and other errata donated by the family of late programmer/designer Chris Oberth. The results, thus far, are one fully functioning game whose code had to be recovered, then compiled, to run on original NES hardware.

Anybody still have their copy of PCTools?

  • Title screen. VGHF / Chris Oberth
  • The qualifying portion employs a pseudo-3D effect, with this portion indicating a straighter path.
  • Here, on the other hand, you need to slow down and turn harder.
  • Once the actual race begins, everything switches to a 2D perspective…
  • …with the visible track indicating that it's time to slow down and start sharply turning. It's weirdly communicated to players, however, which is probably why this footage includes a crash.
  • For this three-lap race, a pit stop seems like overkill—especially since it requires players' button taps to operate.
  • Finish line. If the game includes a mode with more than three laps or a "season" of races, we haven't seen it yet.
  • Winner!

The game in question is based on Days of Thunder, a stock-racing film from 1990 starring Tom Cruise. One reason this version got lost in the shuffle is because a tie-in DoT video game came out the same year, as published by Mindscape. Oberth's co-creation, for the same publisher, was dated one year earlier, and it looks quite different. As Frank Cifaldi, VGHF co-director, points out, the unreleased prototype had only been mentioned once by Oberth: in a 2006 interview with the retro-gaming fan newsletter Retrogaming Times.

While trying to recover other lost games from the designer, the archival team noticed a single disk labeled "NINTENDO: HOT ROD TAXI, FINAL." The recovered prototype from this disk turned up a playable "early proof-of-concept" project about cars driving through a city, but its existence, and a brief guess that it was somehow related to Days of Thunder, was enough to focus the archivists' search on other disks for anything that might need coddling to work on an NES.

That guidance paid off when the team located a 21-disk archive of a single hard drive (conveniently labeled: "PCTools 5.10 Backup"). Miraculously, all 21 disks could be read, and initial attempts to read the archive turned up a file directory with hints of Days of Thunder. Eventually, VGHF's team used an era-appropriate computer to load PCTools in native MS-DOS, which allowed them to extract a jumble of files.

Instead of a ready-for-gaming ROM, archivist Rich Whitehouse found the source code, along with most of the game's data and its assembler, in a single directory. In VGHF's Monday post, Whitehouse chronicles the pains he went through to find a few key pieces of data spread elsewhere on Oberth's hard drive backup, particularly a set of "tiles" (as in, static pixel art that the NES renders and cycles through) needed to display the game's graphics. This file was quite elusive, andRead More – Source

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