Lost Nintendo game lives after 50 years as arcade collector uses ancient film reels and Wii-style tech to create "what might be the only playable Wild Gunman" machine in the world

Wild Gunman is a cornerstone of Nintendo history. Created by legendary Game Boy designer Gunpei Yokoi, this arcade machine used film reels to let you play out Wild West gun battles against live-action outlaws. The game would eventually be recreated as a traditional, pixel art light gun game for NES, and would be referenced in numerous future Nintendo products, but the original has effectively been lost to time. Until now, that is, as an arcade collector has just created the closest thing you're going to find to the real thing.

That collector is Callan Brown, who goes by 74XX Arcade Repair, and who's just released an extensive YouTube video explaining how he's gone about recreating Wild Gunman (thanks, Time Extension). "This is not quite a replica," Brown warns, but "rather a reimagining of the Wild Gunman '74 experience with modern hardware."

The original version of Wild Gunman sold in very limited quantities, as Brown cites an old interview with Yokoi suggesting that only around 100 units were shipped out. An untested original cabinet was also sold at auction in 2023, but that one has since disappeared into the ether. If there's a working Wild Gunman machine in the world, its whereabouts are unknown.

Part of the problem is the arcade machine's reliance on actual film reels being played over and over again. The game was built around four sets of footage, labeled A, B, C, and D, which each featured their own outlaws to take down. You'd see a little movie of a gunman, get an indication that it's time to shoot, and you'd either see a failure screen where you're shot down or some victory footage with your opponent's defeat.

Film can't really withstand that kind of constant replaying, so very few of the original reels are still in working order today. In fact, it wasn't until 2021 that any reels were known to exist at all, when one collector managed to collect the D footage.

WILD GUNMAN: Resurrecting Nintendo's First Coin-Op on its 50th Anniversary - YouTube

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That's where Brown got lucky: he stumbled on an eBay auction for a set of unknown Nintendo film reels. He soon discovered that these reels contained the full B and D footage, as well as a part of A. C is still effectively lost for now, but there hasn't been this much Wild Gunman footage available in many years.

So, Brown decided to do the only reasonable thing he could with all this film: he digitized it and set to work on building his own Wild Gunman arcade cabinet – one featuring more durable, modern technology. His replica cabinet is built out of plywood and 3D-printed modules, but it's the stuff inside that's most interesting.

Brown assembled a recreation of the original game in Unity using his digitized footage. Rather than an old-school light gun detector, he's installed infrared LEDs and used the gun itself as the detector, which is very similar to the technology used for the Wii remote pointer. An office projector displays the footage on the screen, and an Arduino, an open-source circuit board often used in tech projects, controls a set of LEDs on the front panel to track your score.

It's not a perfectly authentic experience, but it does represent "what might be the only playable Wild Gunman '74 experience in North America, or maybe the world," as Brown puts it. He plans to showcase it at Ontario Pinfest in May, and says on Reddit that he also intends to release the Arduino code and Unity game sometime in the future.

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