Before you see The Great Gatsby, play The Great Gatsby

This weekend, Baz Luhrmann takes a crack at interpreting F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby. Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby seems to already miss the point, but given how sexy the trailer is, I couldn’t care less.

While we wait for the movie to open, there’s always the Great Gatsby videogame. Like Gatsby himself, you can’t really be sure where this NES tie-in came from. One version of its backstory is that a guy named Charlie Hoey made it. The backstory I prefer, supported by a magazine ad not nearly tacky enough for videogame ads from the 90s, goes as follows:

I found it at a yard sale. I bought it for 50 cents and went home to try it out. After dusting off my NES for like, 20 minutes I got it working, and jesus. So weird. Apparently it’s an unreleased localization of a Japanese cart called “Doki Doki Toshokan: Gatsby no Monogatari”

Whatever its true origins, The Great Gatsby videogame has not been gunned down while floating on an air mattress in its pool. Instead, it is fully playable here. I can’t get past the Valley of Ashes myself, which is probably for the best where Myrtle Wilson is concerned.