Video game preservation has come a long way in the past few years, with collectors and historians alike recognizing the importance of maintaining games that would otherwise be long forgotten. This latest development from the scene is quite an unusual one – a scrapped video game based on 1990 NASCAR action movie Days of Thunder, starring Tom Cruise, has been pieced together from 40 separate floppy discs.
While a Days of Thunder game was released by the same planned publisher, Mindscape, it was put together by a different developer and was an entirely different project. This newly uncovered Days of Thunder title was developed by Chris Oberth, who worked on a variety of games from the late ’70s through to the early 2000’s. He sadly passed away in 2012, though his family shared some of his development materials with the Video Game History Foundation.
As Polygon reports, it was in these materials that the team found a floppy disc labelled “Nintendo Hot Rad Taxi Final”, a tech demo of sorts which suggested more un-released games and prototypes could be found. Soon enough, they hunted down nearly 40 floppy discs’ worth of code to compile the unreleased Days of Thunder game, which you can check out below.
Best of all, a group unaffiliated with the VGHF is releasing physical versions of the game, with the proceeds earned going to Oberth’s wife, although as of this writing the website appears to be down.
The Video Game History Foundation will be releasing the game’s source code within a week or so, allowing enthusiasts to piece together a picture of just why the game never hit store shelves and how it was put together in the first place.
Written by Tom Brown
Whether it’s an exciting new entry in a series long established or a weird experiment meant only for the dedicated, Tom is eager to report on it. Rest assured, if Nintendo ever announces Elite Beat Agents 2, he’ll be there.
