The game was co-authored by Chris oberth, a developer known for the arcade games anteater, time killers, world class bowling, and winter games for the commodore 64. Preservationist rich whitehouse has written about his weeks-long journey to resurrect the long-lost title.

oberth died in 2012, but left behind a trove of old computer hardware from his time as a developer. Earlier this year, the hardware was donated to the video game history foundation.

The video game history foundation was approached by a friend of oberth’s surviving family in early 2020. oberth often worked from were piles of old computers, CD-R backups, floppy disks, notes, cassettes, EPROMS, and data tape.

After discovering an early proof of concept for a NES game, the team discovered that the source code for the game might be located. oberth had previously mentioned an unknown game he’d worked on that was based on the film days of thunder.

The software could n’t recognize the files when emulated in DOSBox. The team had to reassemble old hardware to get it to work.

The team were left with a fully constructed NES ROM over 30 years after it was developed. The team eventually managed to piece together all of the data, but it was n’t an easy process.