""One day in July 2025, as I was browsing the arcade parts category on eBay I came across an auction that didn't make a lot of sense to me, a set of Nintendo branded film reels.""
"Dating back to 1974, Wild Gunman was Nintendo's first arcade game, but it was not a video game per se. Using two simultaneous film reel projectors, the light gun western would alternate between them depending on where you shot, triggering a winning or losing state.""
"Gunpei Yokoi requested Fuji use Tetoron, a polyester mix that could be more durable. That said, Yokoi still believed it would begin to wear out after 1,000 play sessions, never mind attract modes.""
"Surviving copies of the Wild Gunman reels are incredibly rare. In 2021, historian Kate Willært believed that the cleanest footage of Nintendo's first game wasn't in arcades, but in an underground experimental short film and the boneheaded '80s comedy."
Nintendo's first arcade game, Wild Gunman, created in 1974, utilized film reel projectors and was not a traditional video game. Its rarity is significant, with no known working cabinets existing. A Canadian arcade repairman, Callan Brown, discovered film reels from the game on eBay and successfully reconstructed the game. Gunpei Yokoi, the game's creator, anticipated durability issues after limited play sessions. Surviving copies of the film reels are extremely rare, with collectors and historians noting their importance in gaming history.
Read at Kotaku
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