At some point in the 80’s the Japanese tried to give The Great Gatsby the pulse-pounding video game adaptation that Fitzgerald had always intended. And we missed it. From GreatGatsbyGame.com:
I really don’t know much about this game. I found it at a yard sale. I bought it for 50 cents and went home to try it out. Apparently it’s an unreleased localization of a Japanese cart called “Doki Doki Toshokan: Gatsby no Monogatari”, but I haven’t found anything about that either. What’s left of the manual was just rubberbanded to the cartridge.
Kyle Chayka wrote an articulate essay about the appeal of this NES mockup game and others like it. From the article:
These pieces of art, visual, musical and written, depend on their relationships with their source material for impact, just as they depend on their viewers or listeners or readers to understand their references. It doesn’t matter that the Gatsby NES game is faked; it only matters that we can approach it appropriately, understanding the piece in terms of its own nostalgia. As another generation of artists and creators comes to prominence, more and more we will see mainstream art making use of digital nostalgia as a potent wellspring of artistic vocabulary.
You can play the “translated” version of the retrofictionalized Doki Doki Toshokan: Gatsby no Monogatari here.
